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Illinois School Board Journal
March/April 2004
Digital kids:
Learning in a new landscape
by Ian Jukes
Ian Jukes is director of The Info-Savvy Group, based in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, and was a presenter at the 2003 IASA Annual Conference.
How many of you have children of your own or that you're responsible for? How many of you have teenagers of your own or that you're responsible for?
Do you ever catch yourself watching them and just shaking your head? Do you ever catch yourself saying, "What's going on here? What's up with these kids today? I wasn't like that when I was that age. I wouldn't have DARED say or do that. Why are they so different? What could possibly be going on in their head? What could they possibly be thinking? What's wrong with this younger generation?"
At the same time some of you might say "hold on - stop - you're wrong - you need to chill out - kids are kids - they make look different - they may sound different, they may act different, but underneath it all they're just kids. They have the same issues, same insecurities, same hurt feelings, same immature ways of looking and thinking about things that we did. They're basically the same way we were when we were that age.
I want you to know that if you believe this, I totally respect your opinion but you're wrong!
Here's what we all need to understand ...
Kids today ARE different! But not just in the clothes they wear - not just because they dye their hair and style it differently than we did - not just because their music is incredibly profane, has no rhythm and is utterly incomprehensible - not just because of the way they talk - not just because of what they say - not just because of how they act - not just because of the body parts they want to pierce, tattoo and/or expose.
A great deal of brain research in the past five years tells us that kids today are fundamentally different in the way they think, in the way they access, absorb, interpret, process and use information and above all, in the way they view, interact and communicate in the modern world. This holds profound implications for us personally and even more implications for education. Let's try to examine why this has happened and what it means for us...
Regardless of how old you are
Most of the people reading this article grew up in times of relative stability. For example, I had two parents. My father worked at the same job for more than 30 years while my mother stayed home to take care of us. Life was predictable. We could literally set our watches by the time Dad turned the corner and came home from work each evening. We all sat down together for a home-cooked meal at the same time every night - 6:30 p.m. Sundays were special. It was church in the morning, Sunday dinner, followed by Disney and a bath whether we wanted it or not.
For many of the people of this generation, there was an amazing rhythm and pace to life in general. And for me personally, and I suspect, for most of you, there was a remarkable predictability to that life.
Change was something that happened ... slowly. But it wasn't just that life was predictable ... our lives were also simpler. When we came home after school, on weekends, and during holidays, we played with our friends outside on the street, in the backyard or at the park, often until it got dark. We could play there because it was safe. Parents didn't have to worry that something horrible was going to happen to us. Everyone looked out for everyone else. There was a sense of community.
And it was outside, on the street or in the park where we learned many of our social skills. We worked in groups to solve problems. We lead, we followed, we fought, we reconciled, we negotiated, we planned, we built teams and we learned to get along - and all this happened face-to-face, if not in-your-face.
Our world was decidedly low technology.
Do you remember Etch-A-Sketch, Mr. Potato Head or Slinkies? For me the ultimate in technology was my 3-speed Schwinn Phantom bike and a transistor radio. Like most other families, we only had one TV. It was in the living room and that's where we sat together as a group watching and discussing what we saw. If we wanted to see the latest movie, we had to go to a theater or the drive-in.
Back then imagination was essential. We created our own monsters and villains. Our stick became a sword and the rock was a horse. We drove our parents parked cars by turning the steering wheel while creating our own sound effects.
And because our lives were low tech, one of the very worst things that could ever happen was to be sent to our room because there was absolutely nothing to do other than to reflect on our crimes.
Communications were basic
Many of us lived on a party line. Long distance phone calls were expensive and of poor quality. Letters took days from the time they were sent to when they were received and even longer to be responded to. Telegrams were only used for important events as a result, whether it was information, goods or communications, we had to learn to wait - we had to learn to be patient.
Information was limited
We only had a few radio stations and even fewer TV channels. World events were something we read or heard about, often long after they happened. Information was finite because we lived in a largely single source world - one of text and paper.
Most of our information came from newspapers, magazines, books, encyclopedias and the library. Multimedia meant it had a diagram or photo. Almost nothing happened right away. We had to wait for everything - information, decoder rings, Mickey Mouse Club memberships, mail-order purchases.
We went to the library. Doing research was a physical act and used the Dewey Decimal system to search the card catalog, then walked through the stacks. If we were lucky enough to locate the book, we flipped through it try to find what we were looking for. We used Funk and Wagnall's, Encyclopedia Britannica, the Book of Knowledge, or our textbook. This was information that could be committed to paper because our world didn't change very quickly.
The schools of our youth
Our schools reflected the times we lived in. They were predictable and safe - they were orderly and punctual. Schools had authority. Teachers and administrators were respected. Kids who misbehaved were dealt with swiftly. Some got detentions - some got the strap or a ruler - and most parents supported the actions of the school.
We sat in rows. The teacher talked, we were expected to listen. Most information came from our teacher or a textbook. The focus was on content recall and as we progressed through the system, teachers became content specialists.
Communications came through the PA system, as most classrooms didn't have phones.
The most powerful technology in most classrooms was a piece of chalk and a blackboard. It was a big deal to have a film and it was absolutely high tech for a teacher to have an overhead projector and multi-colored pens. That was then ...
The world of today is VERY different
It's a world that's constantly on the move. It's no longer the stable place we grew up in. In a few short years the concept of family has moved from the Cleavers to the Osbournes. For example, in 30 years we've gone from 10 percent to 28 percent of families being led by a single parent. Beyond that, we now have blended families, inter-racial families, gay and lesbian families, separated by divorce, multiplied by divorce - any possible combination you could imagine.
The rhythm of life is now dictated as much by work schedules as by family needs. In a seven-day-a-week work world, routines are harder to maintain. Family meals, family time, quiet time, down time Sundays are more difficult to schedule than ever. Life today has developed a fast food mentality both literally and figuratively.
In 68 percent of American homes, the only parent or both parents work in order to make ends meet. As a result, parents today spend 40 percent less time with their children than parents did 30 years ago, and much of that time with our kids is spent watching TV and movies. The scarcest resource for many families today is not time but attention.
Consequently, there's a growing void in kids' lives that needs to be filled.
This trend hasn't just appeared overnight
There's been a steady progression as parents have had less time to spend with their kids. Technology has filled the void. It started with the telephone and TV; then progressed to videos and videogames; and now it's email, surfing, on-line chatting, cell phones and much more.
Today, 64 percent of kids come home from school to no one, because their parents or only parent are at work. Many kids are literally left to their own devices. But for a number reasons, including safety concerns, instead of playing on the street many children now stay inside watching TV or videos, listening to music, playing videogames, chatting on Instant Messenger, talking on the phone and surfing the Web.
In this 24/7 world, these new technologies have become the babysitter. They have become companions to many kids. These devices are increasingly where this generation find their role models and learn their social skills. Their rooms are filled with people, relationships and interactions that come through their computers and phones. They are equally as comfortable with virtual, screen-to-screen relationships as they are with face-to-face relationships.
So while for us the worst thing that could have happened was to be sent to our rooms, most kids today are completely comfortable existing in their digital cocoons.
This shift has had a profound affect on the kids' thinking patterns. In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman estimates that today's college grads have spent 10,000 hours playing video games, 20,000 hours watching TV, over 20,000 hours talking on the phone, not to mention countless hours listening to music and surfing the Web, and using Instant Messenger, chat rooms and email. But at the same time, they've only spent 5,000 hours reading and 11,000 hours attending school.
This explains where they get their role models. Today's world is decidedly more high tech than ours was. Over 70 percent of dollars spent on toys are for electronic games.
Today's kids have access to and take for granted using computers, remote controls, the Internet, email, pagers, cell phones, MP3 players, CDs, DVDs, video games, Palm Pilots and digital cameras - tools and toys that would have been unimaginable when we were kids.
For them, there's never been a time where these digital wonders haven't existed. Consequently they haven't just adopted digital media, they've internalized them. This is a fundamentally different environment than we grew up in. It's a 100-channel TV universe. It's a 10,000 station radio universe accessible online. It's a 7,000,000,000 plus page Internet.
Kids today take for granted that they can view world events as they occur - as TV mini-series that unfold before their very eyes. They see history in the making. They watch the bombing in Afghanistan, the Columbia tragedy, the X games and Wrestlemania - all in real time even though many of these events may be happening halfway around the world. Consequently, for them the notion of time and distance, which meant so much to us, means very little.
Twitch speed
This generation operates at twitch speed. Kids accept as normal that they'll have instantaneous access to information, goods and services at the click of a mouse. They expect to be able to communicate with anyone or anything at anytime, anywhere day or night. This has led to the death of patience and the emergence of a society increasingly expecting, wanting and demanding instant gratification. For example, I recently overheard a student complaining that it had taken her 20 minutes to register for her courses at college - and she was doing this online from her dorm room!
Such expectations are the result of a massive shift of information and services to the Web. Today, from their desktop, from a laptop, from a handheld device, they have access to literally every library, every art gallery, and every museum in the world. More relevant for kids, they also have access to friends, games, music, shopping, cheat sheets, and more than 7000 online clubs specifically design to attract digital kids.
An MTV mindset
They've also developed an MTV mindset. This generation has grown up not just with text-based information but also images, sounds, and video presented as a single entity. This isn't multimedia. As David Thornburg suggests, this is monomedia - because they get it all from a single device.
Kids are completely comfortable with the visual bombardment of simultaneous images, text and sounds because they provide experiences that can convey more information in a few seconds than reading an entire book. These new media are not just designed for passive viewing because increasingly, passive viewing just doesn't cut it. This generation no longer wants just to be the audience, just to be passive viewers; they like to be the actors. They expect, want and need interactive information, interactive resources, interactive communications, and relevant, real life experiences, which explains the rise in popularity of reality based shows.
And it's absolutely critical to stress that this trend is not just unique to North American kids. This trend is pervasive for most children around the world, regardless of socio economics, culture, race or religion.
They're different
Digital kids are different than when we were growing up. Not just a little different but fundamentally different. They crave access to tools that let them network with their peers or anyone or anything else they choose to interact with. And for them, it's second nature to multitask. They demand tools that provide hyperlinks and instantaneous random access that allow them to connect everyone and everything to everyone and everything else simultaneously for instant gratification.
They can be doing their homework, talking on the phone, listening to music, downloading movies, surfing the Web, and maintaining multiple simultaneous conversations on a chat line ... and still be bored.
This has become their replacement for what we did on the street or the park. As they've become increasingly immersed in the new digital landscape this is where they learn many of their social skills.
Digital natives
Make no mistake about it. If we could use a time machine to bring teenagers forward from the '60s or '70s and immerse them in the world of today, they would find it to be a dizzying if not overwhelming experience. Today's kids have been shaped by the digital environment they are growing up in. They use digital technology transparently, without thinking about it, without marveling at it, without wondering about how it works. It's their native language - a language in which they are digitally fluent. They are the digital natives.
But most of the people reading this article grew up in the '60s, '70s and '80s. In much the same way that kids today have been shaped by their world, we were shaped by the text-based, simple, predictable, relatively stable, low-tech world we grew up in.
A different digital divide
Today we face a digital divide. Not just one based on haves and have-nots, but by one caused by the fundamental difference in the way we grew up. We come from another land and time. In today's world, we are foreigners. We are digital immigrants who speak and hear digital with a non-digital accent.
We don't understand their fascination with instant messaging. We can't comprehend their obsession with digital devices, video games and the online culture. We're distracted and disoriented by multiple, simultaneous, information sources and random access. We try to use old mindsets to do new things. We need to read a manual, take a course or watch a video. And while we may use the digital tools, they're not always intuitive and their use does not come naturally.
We're DSL. We speak digital as a second language. That's why we're digital immigrants. Like all immigrants some of us are better than others at adapting to the ways of the new country but like all immigrants, we retain some degree of our accent from the old country.
The thicker the accent, the harder it is to understand and adapt to the new digital landscape. We struggle as we apply old thinking to new ways of doing things, new technologies, new software and new mindsets. And the thicker our accent, the harder it is to be understood by the digital natives.
You know you're DSL when you talk about dialing a number - when you need a manual or course to learn new software - when you use the Internet for information second rather than first - when you phone people to tell them about a Web site - when you print out your email to read it - or print out a report to edit it
Digital natives on the other hand, pick up new devices and start experimenting with them right away. They assume that the inherent design of the devices will teach them how to use them. The digital native has adopted a mindset of rapid-fire trial and error learning. They use devices experientially, and then get help online.
But digital immigrants just can't conceive how anyone can learn like this. By the time a digital immigrant has read the table of contents of a manual the digital native has already figured out 15 things that will work and 15 things that won't.
While the digital immigrant is afraid they'll break the device, the digital native knows they can just hit the reset button and do it all over again. In fact, for digital natives, the WORLD is one great big reset button.
Digital immigrants don't understand this. Digital immigrants focus on and try to apply the skills learned in another time. And we often don't appreciate the skill development of digital natives skills that kids have honed to perfection with years of trial and error practice - for example, have you ever played a video game with a kid and got your butt kicked?
What some digital immigrants can't appreciate is that the reason kids don't have the same skills and literacies as we do is that there has been a profound shift in the kind of skills used in the modern world. The reason their skill development is different is because their focus is different. They're developing skills in other areas than we did - skills like game playing, online searching, and online messaging - and they do all of this simultaneously.
We fail to understand, let alone esteem or value the skill development they do have. Instead we complain about the skill development they don't have. Because digital isn't our native language - because we're immigrants, we unconsciously look down our noses at kids who act differently because they have a completely new and different set of skills than the ones we have.
We unconsciously assume they're not as good and not as literate as we are because they don't seem to value or prioritize our literacies. So instead of embracing the new, instead of recognizing that it's a new digital world many immigrants complain and remain attached to the old and talk about how much better it was in the old country.
What research tells us
Because of digital bombardment - because of the pervasive nature of digital experiences - current research tells us that the brains of the digital generation have and continue to change physically and chemically. And we absolutely can't afford to dismiss or ignore what the overwhelming evidence is telling us.
First, brain research tells us that the window of opportunity for learning any new language fluently without an accent begins to close between the ages of 10 and 12. Anyone who learns a language later in life not only has greater difficulty in learning the language, but the learning is situated in different parts of the brain than those who learned the language earlier.
For the longest time, conventional thinking was that by age 3, we had a fixed number of brain cells, which then started to die off one by one. For the longest time, it was believed that, regardless of race, culture, or experiences, we all thought in basically the same way - that we all used the same neural pathways to process information.
However, in the past 5 years both of these beliefs have been shown to be wrong. Neurobiological research shows that the brain constantly reorganizes itself structurally throughout life based on input and its intensity. This process or reorganization is called neuroplasticity. What this means is that the brain literally restructures neural pathways on an ongoing basis.
However, brains don't just change on their own. They require sustained stimulation and focus over long periods of time. What we're talking about here is several hours a day, seven days a week. For example, learning to read and write required our brains to be reprogrammed over extended periods of time - several hours a day, seven days a week.
In the same way, watching TV for extended periods of time reprogrammed our brains - several hours a day, seven days a week.
Does several hours a day, seven days a week remind you of anything else? This is increasingly what's been happening to digital kids' brains since the arrival of Pong in 1974. Today video games, computers, cell phones and a multitude of other devices facilitate hypertext, interactivity, networking, random access and multitasking - several hours a day seven days a week. These experiences are literally rewiring kids' brains so that they process information differently than we do.
Cognomics
A new field of study has emerged during the past few years - cognomics - the digital analysis of brain processes. Using high-strength magnetic resonance imaging scanners, known as a functional MRI or fMRI, to digitally analyze the brain's thinking patterns at the molecular level, we've learned more about how the brain operates in the last three years than we did in the previous 100 years.
If we were to take an electronic scan of our parents' brains and compare them to ours, we would quickly see that we use slightly different neural pathways to process the same information than our parents. In the same way, if we were to take an electronic scan of our brains and compare them to those of our kids' brains, we would find that they use fundamentally different neural pathways to process the same information than we do.
This is why digital natives process information differently than digital immigrants and helps explain why they act the way they do. This also explains the fundamental difference between our generation and theirs. Yet, sadly, almost none what we have learned about how the brain functions is being applied to learning today.
What implications does this hold for schools?
It's long been known talking at students is not effective. You may have heard the saying:
I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
In How the Brain Learns, Dr. David Sousa writes about how we remember. While we can't hope to do justice to his explanation, research in cognitive psychology has taught us that learning is not a process of transmission, but a process of construction. In other words, for knowledge to really "stick,' students need to have experiences where they discover information and then synthesize that new knowledge with what they have previously understood to "construct" their own understanding of the world. This is what we call Velcro learning.
What Sousa suggests is that when new information is presented to a learner, that information moves into the learner's short-term memory, where it remains for approximately 24 hours. During that time, the learner must make connections between what's in their short-term memory and their long term memory. If this is not done within 24 hours, most of the information will have been forgotten.
Recent research from the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine, reinforces this. Consider this learning pyramid. Essentially, on average we recall:
What the research tells us is that if you want understanding, if you want retention, if you want success on state exams, if you want to address the mandates of NCLB, if you want children to demonstrate proficiency, you can't just lecture to these kids and the emphasis in the classroom can't just be on simple data information recall and low level thinking skills.
If we want our kids to be successful on the test, if we want them to be successful in life our emphasis as professional educators has to be on more than just that. Rather there has to be more emphasis placed upon higher order thinking skills (HOTS), on Bloom Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking, on critical thinking, on problem solving, on project and process based learning. School must become a place where students actively engaged in constructing their own knowledge and know how, develop an understanding and the ability to apply key content concepts and ideas, explore dynamically, discover, pose questions and question answers, solve problems, engage in complex tasks that enable them to address essential questions and participate in the processes that make up intellectual accomplishment, tasks that are generally inquiry driven, span different media, link different disciplines, have more than one right answer, multiple routes to each of these answers, an understandable purpose and a connection to the real world outside school.
The current curriculum regularly stresses content without providing a context. In doing so we don't equip our students with anything more than the ability to regurgitate meaningless facts. The context of a significant event provides a frame of reference and relevance for remembering the specific information about what you were doing long after the event. By providing a context for the new information teachers are actually helping students with long-term memory. The power of context to assist with learning is worthy of note for teachers who are struggling to prepare students for large standardized tests.
By providing a context for the information teachers are actually helping students learn the material so their short-term recall will be better when they write the test as well as with long-term recall.
So, what do we see in schools today?
Do schools reflect the reality of the world as it is? Or do they reflect us, our past, our values, our thinking, our perspectives, our experiences, or our comfort zone? Do our instructional practices align with the issues raised by the research?
Do our instructional practices align with the issues raised by this presentation? Or is there dissonance between what was and what is? Is there a dissonance between what is and what should be?
Déjà vu all over again
Just like 50-plus years ago, many students still sit in rows - the oral tradition continues - many teachers still chalk and talk - students are still expected to learn primarily by listening - most information still comes from the teacher or textbook - and while we do have some new technologies most use is generally optional not integral and typically it's used to reinforce old practices and assumptions about learning.
The methodologies underlying the technologies and the methodologies underlying instruction have changed very little from our youth. And most importantly, the focus still remains on content without context and low-level content recall. Today's standards and high stakes testing are simply reinforcing this.
Digital accents
The world of tapes, books, movies and traditional oral presentation is largely linear. Our youth live and thrive in the world of non-linear information access. "Channel surfing," for example, is a popular pastime as our students use the TV remote control to keep up with several programs being broadcast at the same time. I wonder, as we see an increased incidence of "attention deficit disorder" among young people, whether this malady is real, or if it is merely an artifact caused by the structure of school. If we persist in presenting information in ways that have nothing to do with how our students perceive information, why wouldn't their attention wander?
So when kids walk into class at beginning of the year and teachers speak to them, they instantly hear their teachers digital accent - some accents are thicker than others - and there's an immediate disconnect. Consciously or unconsciously, they sense that many of their teachers aren't a part of, not in synch with, and probably don't understand the world digital natives live in.
As a result, it's becoming increasingly evident that there is a fundamental disconnect between the way kids think, learn, and communicate and the way schools interact with them. And this is reflected in startling new data gathered by the Center for Education Statistics
In "The Condition of Education 2002" (http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/), the data shows the seriousness of the disconnect between the real world of the high-school student and the real world of schools. Children's view of the relevancy of their school experience to their future lives has declined steadily since the late 1980s.
Today, only 28 percent of 12th-grade high school students believe that school work is meaningful; only 21 percent believe that their courses are interesting; and a mere 39 percent believe that school work will have any bearing on their success in later life.
And these statistics are even more shocking when one realizes that these are only the opinions of those students who have remained in high school for four years. Students who find the high school experience the least relevant have already exited the system in huge numbers.
The Carnegie Institute reports that in the largest 32 urban districts in our country, only 50 percent of students who enroll actually graduate. Each day, 2000 U.S. high school students drop out. If their voices were heard in the above poll, the profile would be far worse.
Why has this happened?
Well - who's in control of education? We are! What's wrong with that? We are digital immigrants. The schools of today reflect our comfort zone, our experiences, our views of technology, our views of instruction and our views of learning. We have a Polaroid snapshot of the world of then and this is the source of the dissonance. We haven't allowed the institutions of education to reflect the world of today and we're now in the unenviable position of having schools that increasingly reflect a world that does not exist.
Berkeley longshoreman cum philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote: In times of radical change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves perfectly equipped for a world that no longer exists.
So who are we as educators? Are we the learners or are we the learned? More importantly, do we want our kids to inherit the earth ... or do we want them to be highly educated useless people - kids who are good at school but unprepared for life. Because increasingly it appears that our schools have prepared them for a world that no longer exists?
What are we going to do?
The reality is that today we're being driven by state standards, high stakes testing and accountability for all. We're being driven by "No Child Left Untested" sorry - No Child Left Behind. We can't ignore these mandates. We can't just pretend they don't exist.
So how do we address the issues of standards, high-stakes testing and accountability while at the same time addressing the growing dissonance between digital kids learning and our digital immigrant instructional styles?
How can we ensure that truly no child or teacher is left behind? That no student (or teacher) is left unthinking?
This isn't about creating some far-out vision for learning in the future. Conversely, it's not about continuing to fixate on the past - on the back-to-basics mentality that reflects the world of yesterday. It's about understanding that as professionals we must address the issues of standards and accountability on one hand, and the abilities and preferences of digital learners on the other.
If we can do this, we can create truly engaged learning environments that will allow us to address both issues simultaneously. The starting point is to understand HOW different we really are from them.
Summarizing the real digital divide...
1. Native learners prefer receiving info quickly from multiple multimedia sources while many teachers prefer slow and controlled release of info from limited sources.
2. Native learners prefer parallel processing and multi-tasking while many teachers prefer singular processing and single/limited-tasking.
3. Native learners prefer processing pictures, sounds and video before text while many teachers prefer to provide text before pictures, sounds and video.
4. Native learners prefer random access to hyperlinked multimedia information while many teachers prefer to provide information linearly, logically and sequentially
5. Native learners prefer to interact/network simultaneously with many others
6. Many teachers prefer students to work independently rather than network and interact.
7. Native learners prefer to learn "just-in-time" while many teachers prefer to teach "just-in-case" (it's on the exam).
8. Native learners prefer instant gratification and instant rewards while many teachers prefer deferred gratification and deferred rewards.
9. Native learners prefer learning that is relevant, instantly useful and fun while many teachers prefer to teach to the curriculum guide and standardized tests.
This isn't a matter of who's right or wrong
It's not a matter of either/or. This isn't a matter of them or us. It's not a matter of which way is better. The bottom line is that kids are different. They communicate differently than we do. They're motivated by different things than we are. They process information differently than we do. And most importantly, they learn differently than we do.
So how do we bridge this digital divide?
Teachers must learn to communicate in the native language and style of their students? This doesn't mean changing the focus on what is important or what is going to be measured, but it does mean that we have to change our instructional styles.
This also means understanding that there are now two kinds of content The first is our traditional content - reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, civics, history, languages, the sciences, and logical thinking amongst others. While some of these content areas will become less important as our world changes, they are as important today as they have ever been...
But there is also a second kind of content
What we call 21st century content. This includes critical thinking, problem solving and the structured teaching of process skills, combined with personal life skills, interpersonal life skills, team skills, communications skills, information fluency skills, technology fluency skills, visual fluency skills, biotechnology and bioethics skills
If we want to unfold the full intellectual and creative genius of all of our children - if we are going to march through the 21st Century and maintain our tradition of success - if we want our children to have the relevant 21st century skills - we must create a bridge between their world and ours.
School must make it happen for millions of children in the Digital Age. Educators take the pieces of world and put them together so our children can feel whole. Teachers stand in gap between the present and the future - between failure and fulfillment.
It's your energy, creativity, commitment and hard work every day that builds the bridge so children can cross the gap between now and the future. As they do, so does an entire nation. You are America's greatest hope and most important professionals.
Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. - William James
The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. - Albert Einstein
For further reading:
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam, Touchstone Books, 2001, ISBN: 0743203046
Diffusion of Innovations, 4th Edition, Everett Rogers, Free Press, 1995, ISBN:0029266718
Information Anxiety 2, Richard Saul Wurman, Que Publishing, 2000, ISBN:0789724103
Taming the Beast: Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle, Jason Ohler, Technos Press, 2000, ISBN: 0784298735
Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, Don Tapscott, McGraw-Hill, 1997, ISBN: 0070633614
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life, Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard, Penguin USA; 1999 ISBN:0399144463
How the Brain Learns, David Sousa, Corwin Press, 2001, ISBN: 0761977651
How the Special Needs Brain Learns, David Sousa, Corwin Press, 2001, ISBN:0761978518
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, John D. Bransford (editor), Ann L. Brown (editor), Rodney R. Cocking, John B. Bransford (editor) National Academy Press, 1999, ISBN: 0309065577
Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge (editor), Doubleday, 2000, ISBN: 0385493231
Journal Articles
"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1," Mark Prensky, On the Horizon, September/October 2001, Vol. 9, No. 5
"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 2," Mark Prensky, On the Horizon, November/December 2001, Vol. 9, No. 6
Online Articles
"Wnt 2 txt? Or r u j/c? The Evolving Lexicon of Wired Teens," The Christian Science Monitor, Society and Culture, December 12, 2002, online edition
"TeenSites.com: A Field Guide to the New Digital Landscape," The Center for Media Education, 2001, http://www.cme.org/
For further information, contact:
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