"Kids are the authority" in U.S. schools.

[arcadian]

http://www.ascd.org/conferences/Annual_Conference/Conference_Daily/tapscott.aspx

Don Tapscott: How to Teach the Smartest Generation


Don Tapscott, best-selling author of Grown Up Digital and former educational researcher, got laughs and applause for his up-front, optimistic perspective of digital natives and the future of education during Sunday's general session.

In a self-deprecating style with humorous asides, Tapscott urged educators to empower student-led collaboration and to reinvent traditional methods of instruction by embracing technology.

"Internet is not a problem; it is a learning opportunity," Tapscott said. "Don't blame the Internet for how our approach to learning and thinking has changed. That's like blaming the library for ignorance."

Tapscott spoke about the changing generations, explaining that the generation currently making its way through our education system is the first generation born into a major shift in the mode of cognition. "We are creating a generation that is thinking differently from every generation before," he said. " are not just multitasking; they have better abilities to code-switch. They are constantly searching, storytelling, collaborating, developing, and authenticating."

Tapscott addressed the "negative, cynical" attitudes many adults have about today's young people, who often refer to them as an "army of narcissists" or say that they are dumb. The data, he said, prove otherwise: "They are not the dumbest generation. They are the smartest generation."

Tapscott also noted that the family model has changed drastically from the 1950s cliché of the TV show Father Knows Best. Beyond the increase in nontraditional families, Tapscott described how today's kids are "lapping their parents on the information track." Because of this, relationships between parents and their children are shifting from the top-down, father-figure model to a layered model of mutual respect and partnership in which kids are at the center.

So what do these shifts mean for educators? First, the traditional mode of delivery needs to change, because lecturing is no longer effective. Tapscott noted the irony of saying that to an audience in a lecture from a stage. However, he explained that he was not trying to provide facts, but rather attempting to "change your mind about , and that’s all I can achieve here."

He encouraged the educators assembled to disable the generational firewalls that have been erected between them and their students and to embrace a culture of collaboration, integration, and self-organization. Banning social media such as Facebook says "We don't understand your tools. We don’t trust you," Tapscott said.

Customization is also key. A one-size-fits-all approach to education won't work when kids are used to searching online for exactly what they want, when they want it.

And it's not just pedagogy that needs to change. Tapscott said that we need to shift how we develop content and curriculum so that it's more collaborative and multilayered. Textbooks alone aren't enough. We need rich, interactive material.

“For the first time in human history, kids are the authority," he said. "They know more about the digital revolution and its implications for learning than teachers."

[HeresyLives]

1. Every child should have a computer.

And everything in the curriculum should be on software. Scrap testing, and instead ensure the child understands the material by working with it...at his/her own speed.

[marshall]

13. That's known as the Montesorri method

It works well.

[Lance_Boyle]

2. Give up and enjoy the generation of fail you're making.

That's the point of his lecture. Let the kids run the show. Maybe (hopefully) we'll all be dead by the time they take over, 'cuz we damn sure can't teach them how to be decent people when they're young and "the center" of everything.

Dumbass.

[NashVegas]

14. Isn't That What's Happened In Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Works great, doesn't it?

[LisaM]

3. This is hardly the first time there has been this type of cognitive shift

There's a great line in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story that tells of this exact phenomenon - a hundred years ago.


"Mrs. Buckner--a woman of character, a member of Society in a large Middle-Western city--carrying a pitcher of fruit lemonade through her own spacious back yard, was progressing across a hundred years. Her own thoughts would have been comprehensible to her great-grandmother; what was happening in a room above the stable would have been entirely unintelligible to them both. In what had once served as the coachman's sleeping apartment, her son and a friend were not behaving in a normal manner, but were, so to speak, experimenting in a void. They were making the first tentative combinations of the ideas and materials they found ready at their hand--ideas destined to become, in future years, first articulate, then startling and finally commonplace. At the moment when she called up to them they were sitting with disarming quiet upon the still unhatched eggs of the mid-twentieth century".

[KittyWampus]

4. Non traditional families are wonderful. America's hateful policies working against families are not.

Today's students generally can't write an expository essay. All their fractured attention span can muster is one really good paragraph.

Kids need to learn boundaries and discipline. They need to learn to focus and unplug themselves from diversions.

The Cult of Multi-Tasking is founded on bullshit. It really only benefits the moneyed elite.

[Spike89]

5. Maybe a tad over the top

This article is almost the mission statement for the non-profit I work for, but I can't agree with the "kids are the authority" line. I also have problems with the final quote. Teachers and other adults are very much the authority figures, that's true even when they don't perform the role well. The adults can't simply walk away from the responsibility of authority because they "don't understand" the technology or how it is used.

That is also the essence of my problem with the idea that these youngsters, so-called digital natives, "know more about the digital revolution and its implications for learning than teachers." No, maybe they know how to text faster than you and I will ever be able to respond, but without guidance, perspective, and discipline...texting is as valuable a learning experience as paper-and-pen note passing was in the 70s.

[Coventina]

6. I'll tell you right now that there is no way they are the "smartest generation"

I teach college, so I work with these students every day.

These students know how to text and to play video games, yes.

But they hardly know how to TALK in complete sentences, much less WRITE a coherent sentence. They have almost ZERO critical thinking skills. They don't know the difference between a painting and a photograph. I'm dead serious.

Just because they know how to look things up on Wikipedia does not mean they know how to write a research paper.

All this baloney about "multi-tasking" simply means that they can do a bunch of things at once, very poorly.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

7. Mmmm... OK. But couldn't they be the Justice League instead?

[proteus_lives]

9. Your post would work if that was a picture of the Justice League.

It's the Authority, FYI.

[arcadian]

10. That's the point.

[onpatrol98]

8. Montessori method

Wasn't this what the Montessori method was all about?

[The2ndWheel]

11. I guess the Oompa Loompa's will have to write some new songs

"to a layered model of mutual respect and partnership in which kids are at the center"

On the plus side, with kids as the centralized authority around which the world actually does revolve, we finally get to blame them.

[Codeine]

12. That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

One does not "collaborate" or allow children o be the "authority."

We are so desperately fucked.