Growing up Digital? Maybe not.
Finally I am temporarily done with my writing (until my next conference), so I decided to read all the stuff that I have been keeping in the back burner for awhile. To celebrate this joyous occasion, I started Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. So far he doesn’t seem to be saying anything that I don’t know already, but interesting read anyway. I had also read Don Tapscott Growing up Digital three years ago and some of the things he says in that book, especially on Net Generation, is also mentioned here on the early chapters of the book. For some reason, when I first read Growing up Digital, what he was saying about the Net Generation did not bother me as much as it did when I was reading Wikinomics last night. Here’s why:
Growing up Digital, while in some respects is correct in its arguments, set false expectations for me in dealing with my students at Indiana University. Not every day does a graduate student gets to teach her dissertation topic and I was fortunate enough to be given this chance. In Fall 2007, I thought a 100-level seminar called Narratives in the Age of Media Convergence. Set aside all my difficulties in getting the university give me technical support (mind you, IU is among the top ten most-wired universities according to Newsweek), I was a bit surprised to see that my incoming freshmen lacked the media literacy that Tapscott’s book promised me. It was a shock to me as much as it was to them. I kept a blog from the inception of the class to its completion here. To encourage online collaboration I created a class wiki, prepared forums, started a collaborative story project, assigned a blogging assignment as their daily journal, and we read Patchwork Girl as an example of hypertext. The students were in a state of shock the first day, which to my surprise, recovered really quickly. Although all of them had a laptop, most didn’t use it for anything other then to check e-mails. I had instant questions: How are we going to use the Wiki? What do I write in a blog? I have nothing interesting to say. My favorites: How are we going to get graded for the blogs? What if someone deletes all the changes/additions I made in the collaborative story project?”
Is Indiana University an exception to the rule? I think not. I remember Howard Rheingold coming to IU to talk about smart mobs last year and when he was asked about media access and the digital divide, he responded that media access wasn’t the financial ability to buy these technologies anymore, it is being fluent in the literacy of these media. All my students had laptops, some had MACs, a luxury that I didn’t even permit myself, but most had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Which begs the question: where are these kids who grew up digital?
