The following tweet from @zbpipe has touched upon some recent thoughts of mine:
It occurred to me recently that my generation is the last to have grown up in a world without the internet, and how akin that makes us to Zoe’s darling grandmother. With the introduction of radio broadcasts, previously isolated people could receive hints of worldviews beyond their everyday reality. They might even be confronted by views they found challenging, or which stretched their understanding of acceptable communication and morality. While it’s true that books can and do perform a similar function, radio is unshackled from the physical and intellectual restrictions that closes off so many to literature. Radio is open, spontaneous and instantaneous in a way books can never be. Thus, these people were the first to become part of an unseen community, their worldviews linked by technology in an intangible yet revisionary way.
My generation, on the other hand, was born into a world where those unseen communities had developed to their farthest extent. With television we could view images from all over the planet, and hundreds of channels brought a vast range of perspectives. Yet, little to no outlet was available to express oneself back, and the true limitation of these passive technologies was revealed to be their inability to interact spontaneously with the influence they distributed. A listener or viewer could be linked to something greater than their day to day reality, but then what? The power to change that very something remained in the hands of an elite few, of frequently dubious motivation.
When I was eleven I logged on to the internet for the first time. One of my first acts as an online citizen was to type Pokemon into the Yahoo search bar. I now find it telling that my literal first impulse was to seek out a community of like-minded users, to hear what others thought of something I cared about. After initially discovering an official site, I found other, less formal sites made by regular fans. These early site runners were paving the way for an idea which has quickly come to define the internet, encapsulated in the term “Web 2.0.” The web now links its users in an active sense, and for the first time there is the ability to spontaneously and collaboratively build a community instead of having one thrust upon you. In essence it is the difference between simply sharing a worldview, and collectively and perpetually constructing one.
With this change comes new power dynamics. Whereas in the radio era content was decided by an elite few, power now has the potential to be distributed across those with the best ideas, not simply with the best employment positions. Dynamic contribution is becoming one of the inherent rights of the online world, and it in turn is providing an excellent model on which educators can adapt their classrooms. The recent and ongoing battle against SOPA has emphasized beyond all doubt that freedom, to select and contribute online without limitation, is one of the defining rights of the internet community. This is the mentality that the children of today are being born into, and It is going to have massive ramifications on how classrooms of the future function. The expectation that 21st century learners can collaborate and customize the learning process is becoming the norm in their day to day lives. The education system must adapt in kind to this new paradigm.
