digital natives

Talking about my students' lack of exposure to some web 2 tools has reminded me of a nagging worry. We send our students off to do new creative eLarning tasks -- create an imovie, make a blog, design a web page...and anything else we learned a minute ago. I've already said that I think our generalisation and stereotyping of this next generation make us think that they already know it all -- when the reality of my students is that they know what they know (eg facebook and myspace) as second nature but are totally oblivious to anything else. So what happens as we congratulate ourselves on how hip we are to the new technologies in setting this new assignment?

Well, it probably means that the few tech junkies in our class, or those with older siblings or parents using these tools at work etc are amazingly competent and the rest feel inadequate and frustrated and envious of those few. They can't get quality help from us because we barely knew enough to set the task and assumed these 'natives' would blitz it, and the other usual resource -- parents -- are no help at all! They rely on the good will of their cleverer classmates...Is this acceptable for an assessment task???

What I'm saying is that we should use our usual standards of frameworking and pretesting and TEACHing to the setting of such tasks. And no, I don't say the teacher has to know everything before it begins, but nor should we hand it out and say teach yourselves in a way we would be horrified about in any other area of study. We should find out what they do and don't know and then take step to fill in the gaps before proceeding for some -- and this may mean moving over and letting skilled students guest teach -- but in the name of equity all who need lessons must be given adequate teaching before they are expected to produce such tasks. (And this may also mean differentiated tasks or speed so we don't hold anyone back)

I know this all sounds a little obvious, but I do think it is a bit of a blind spot as we seek to keep up with where we think our students are...