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Monday 23rd October 2006 7:46 am
Mimi Ito: Do young people really take “naturally” to digital media?
Although kids’ use of the Internet and video games may seem effortless, it actually takes a lot of effort, ongoing learning, and a supportive social environment.
We often assume that young people have a natural affinity to new media like video games and the Internet, and that learning how to use these technologies is effortless for them. But looking at the life histories of young people who are very fluent with digital media, we find a multitude of factors that have supported their ongoing access and learning. Having computer and Internet access in the home is just one piece of the puzzle. Unstructured time, friends and family who support technology-related interests, and most importantly, ongoing and sustained engagement with new technology from an early age are the conditions that produce tech-savvy youth.
The problem is that these conditions occur “naturally” for some kids and not others, and that’s what makes digital literacy so variable. Kids can be discouraged from certain uses of computers because of lack of basic access, but also through fears of appearing geeky, lack of friends who share interests, or siblings who get first dibs on the family PC. As Henry Jenkins notes, over half of US teens are creating media online, but nearly half aren’t.
One goal of our project is to unpack what it means to be “fluent” and “natural” with digital technology, and document the technical, social, and cultural environments that support this kind of lifelong learning and literacy.
Category: Unexpected
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Jill
University of Bergen
http://jilltxt.net
Posted on October 29 2006 7:51 AM
I’m constantly surprised at how much students still don’t know about digital media. Some things have changed a lot in the last five years. For instance, it’s now trivial to have a group of twenty twenty-year-olds set up their first blog or participate in a complicated environment combining commands like “say” and “emote” with clicking and typing words to manipulate objects. Five years ago those things alone took hours of explaining and coaxing, and there’d undoubtably be a few students who needed to learn the difference between a single and a double click and how the operating system worked. This difference in general student fearlessness around technology makes a major difference in teaching - you can leap ahead so much faster!
On the other hand, I’m surprised every single semester at how limited most students’ use of the internet is. Five years ago I was shocked when I at the end of a talk about social software, blogs, etc, to twenty-year-old design students thought they seemed kind of quiet and thought to ask how many of them had actually heard about blogs or, say, amazon.com before - only two of fifty had. Today they’ve heard of blogs but still mostly don’t really know what they are.
Admittedly student populations can be very different from each other. 30% of my web design students this spring already had blogs, and most were pretty tech savvy, although few of them had thought about the technology they use critically or reflectively. This semester I’m teaching language majors their sole technology course and while they’re all interested and quick to learn they have extremely limited knowledge about the internet. They use mobile phones, email and instant messaging and that’s about it, based on the conversations we’ve had.
So yes. My students do have far greater skills (they know how to use a mouse) and find it easier to get into a new technology than my students did five years ago - but many of them still have limited experience with or knowledge of what’s possible and happening online today, and virtually none of them have though critically about what it means for them, for society or for our options for communication.