Technology has tremendously transformed the way this generation lives and views life
- With a remote control they can zap through as many TV channels as they wish: Movie channels, Drama, music, documentary, cartoons, news etc.
- With a DVD player they can see their favourite films in any language with or without subtitles at any time of the day.
- With a joystick, they can play and control as many games as they like.
- With a mobile phone, they can make or receive calls wherever they are. They also can write short messages and take photos or play games.
- With an ipod they can listen to music or else while walking, riding, or relaxing; indoors or outdoors. They can choose their brands: ipod-classic, ipod-nano, ipod-shuffle, ipod-touch etc.
- With PMPs (Portable multimedia players) they can play different digital audio, images, and video.
- With a USB flash drive they can copy and store a huge quantity of files in different shapes and extensions like TIFF, DOC, PDF, PPT, MP3, MPEG, MOV, AVI, JPG, GIF, XLS etc.
- With the Internet they can engage in any of a multitude of on line discussions with other users from all over the world in real time span. They can be members in different chat rooms or saloons. They can also build up blogs, forums, social networks and virtual communities; They can also make researches, design web-pages and download e-books, movies, songs and diverse utilities using torrents. Besides this, they can sign up to different forums, social networks as well as having personal e-mail boxes.
- With a computer or a laptop, they can write, draw, design, calculate, classify, using different programs like “word processor”, “PowerPoint”, “Publisher”, “InfoPath”, “spreadsheets”, “I can write 2” and many other assisting software. Instead of metres they use pixels and instead of grams they use bytes.
- With a digital camera, they can make films of their own and take photos for different uses either for school or personal projects. They even can modify them to look funny and witty.
- With their new jargon, 1.0.1, hackers, pirates, viruses, Trojans, worms, phishing, etc, we need to be cautious. If we don’t catch up with them, they’ll surely go astray. They need us to collect enough reliable knowledge to form some ethics and wisdom of their own and do the right thing for the right reason. We don’t want to read a new cyber copy of “The lord of the flies” in the near future.
That's why Ian Jukes refers to them as "screenagers". They are different because they are not using these e-gadgets as we are. We use them just for entertainment, while they use them as arbitrary constituents of their learning and discovering processes.
Well! Surely it is insane to believe for a second that these students will learn anything outside this digital realm of information technology. Using the chalkboard in teaching them is just persecuting education and suffocating progress and eventually generating disturbed freaks who may not allow us to interfere with their coded virtual plans for a gloomy future.
The point is that our teaching methods and tools should be modified and transformed accordingly. The teachers must cope with the evolution in the field of technology to be able to redirect them when needed. These digital natives need to go to a school which reflects their true daily lives and meet their interests. A school void of e-materials is a cave for primitive tribes to which they don’t want to belong. As human beings of course, they are keen on learning new things and acquiring more experience and skills but their condition is to provide them with the appropriate methods and tools they are used to in their daily life. What if they are forced to be taught in the same old environment where their grandparents used to study?!
It is true that technology has defects, but we must be aware that we have no other options. The 21st century learners as well as we are already part of this complicated net of connections. Once we decide to reject the new wave, we make the worst decision ever. We can adapt for the sake of the learners and together we can tame technology to serve our noble goals the maximum.
The 21st century learners do not need information and knowledge to be transmitted to them, they can get whatever they need to know the easiest and the fastest way by means of search engines. Sometimes they don’t even need to look for information because information comes up to them thanks to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) service. What the learners need the most is the way they can decide if a given collected piece of information is authentic and how they can use it to form new meaning. And these are competencies and skills which make the whole of the new teacher’s work. The latter becomes more a facilitator or mentor than a teacher. The kids she is dealing with are no longer in need of long lectures but they seek to answer the “how” questions rather than the “what” ones.
No more instructions because these learners are learning through:
* Search engines
* Instant messenger
* Social Networks
* Wikis
* Blogs
* Discussions
* Chat
* Curiosity
* Interactivity
* Cooperation
* Collaboration
* Team-work
* etc
In brief they have tendency to learn through doing. This is constructivism as opposed to the old instruction-based methods of the past. This simply means that the 21st century learners are in need of new and practical collaborative pedagogical methods like Task-based approach.
Abdessalami
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