At the start of week 2 in EME 6414 we began by reading an important article by Marc Prensky, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Pensky argues that generational differences are greater than they use to be due to the rapid increase in technology during the last few decades, especially in regards to social media. He even refers to this as a singularity and notes that modern children spend twice as much time playing video games a reading, and argues that this has resulted in different 'brain structures' among younger generations. What I found especially interesting about this is the way that Prensky talks about a different political and ethical system that comes with this new type of knowledge and education. However, as soon as he introduces this distinction he passes. I would love to have heard him spend more time on this topic, talking about how we have new ethical and polical realities due to digital natives. At first glance I don't think that I entirely agree, but I would love to hear an argument in this regard. In the end Presnky argues for a form of gamification that will best educated digital natives. On this point I think it is obvious that he is correct.
Knowledge Communities On Pinterest
As the week is coming to an end for EME 6414 I thought I would go through one final reading for the week as I compose my final blog post. I took a look at an article from Hu, Torphy, Opperman, Jansen, and Lo regarding knowledge communities on Pinterest. They focus on the informal learning that takes place through Pinterest, an online platform where individuals can post images of projects that they have been working on to spark discussions regarding best practices in the classroom or other topics that may come up. Not surprisingly, the authors found that Pinterest was the most popular form of social media use to share technology ideas for the classroom. Through the process of sharing ideas, the authors point out that social capital is developed among educators on Pinterest through this unique Social Knowledge Community. This is simply to say that when teachers are looking for new ideas they turn to those that they see as peers and mentors through this social space. Yet, what ...
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