Week 1

After assimilating all of this week's reading materials, I am left with one simple thought: Learning in the digital age requires new methodology regardless of, and even in the absence of, technology. By that I mean that technology, defined as the Internet, digital media, computers and so on, has structured how Digital Natives most effectively learn, or absorb and process information into knowledge, but that technology has failed to prove itself absolutely necessary to the learning experience.

For example, a classroom of students can be subdivided into groups of four or five students allowed to work together. Thus, those students are allowed to network their learning in a fashion that mimics the interactive flow of information on the Internet without the use of electronic equipment. This creates and "information ecology" and supports the thought that knowledge results from consensus-building through conversation, asserted in the article "Learning Amongst the Riches." In other terms, this would be a classroom as cloud computing.

However, learning in the total absence of technology would be a calamity. The Web 2.0 allows students to broaden their Personal Learning Networks far beyond the confines of the classroom and supports learning as a social process. In addition, technology can bolster experiential learning in in ways that a traditional classroom experience, save for rare lessons such as chemistry experiments, cannot.

For example, elementary students in the Governor Mifflin School District are allowed to play online learning games in class. One of these games asks students to burst a wall of balloons, each with a number on it. To accomplish this, the student must fire another balloon, again marked with a number, at the wall of balloons. In order for the balloons to burst, the fired balloon must make contact with a stationary balloon in which the numbers correspond to a mathematical equation, such as x+y=z. This turns simple math drills, which students might find boring, into an experiential, game-based activity.

Today's learning environment requires teachers to adapt their methods to the innate learning paths with which Digital Natives are endowed. But perhaps the most important lesson teachers must convey is, "The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information...," which was proposed in the article "Connectivism." Technology and the teaching methods created by technology are only pipelines through which information is fed to students. Teachers are necessary to shape students into thinking individuals capable of filtering out the unimportant information in an age of increasingly over-abundant information.