From CNET News
April 24, 2008
Are wired kids well served by schools?
By Stefanie Olsen
Palo Alto, Calif. — Among the generation of kids growing up wired, many teens are hyper-motivated to learn a special skill like how to create a podcast, direct a YouTube video, publish an anime site, or hack an iPhone.
Now if only teachers could inspire such ingenuity.
That was one of the basic questions that had academics scratching their heads here Wednesday at Stanford University, where a group of researchers from the University of Southern California and University of California at Berkeley presented their first findings from one of the largest ethnographic studies on kids in digital environments....
Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say....
"Schools are breeding these delayed-gratification animals," said Dilan Mahendran, a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, who worked on one study.
Part of this is happening because American families have shifted from a television culture in the living room to a bedroom culture, in which many kids have television or a computer in their room. Another reason is that teens go online to hang out with friends because they don't have a place to go offline, according to danah boyd, a doctoral candidate at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and one of the researchers....