21stCenturyLearner

The 21st Century Learner Our children and students are bombarded daily by a litany of digital stimuli and influences, and they make sense of this world according to their schema and experiences. It is important for the educator to understand that it may be more dificult to engage and motivate today's youth with traditional learning tools, given their access to numerous visual, auditory and cerebral stimuli, starting at a very young age. It is important to take a proactive role in helping today's student navigate through an everchanging and presumptive landscape. The 21st Century Learner, for the most part, is a passive prosumer, with very little understanding of implications or consequence of on-line behaviour.

Pedagogical experts recognize that children and adolescents learn in different ways than in years gone by. Ian Jukes, (who we first saw at the National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio, 2008) has several interesting articles on the subject (see [|Ian's website] for copies of these articles). Among the titles, consider reading 21st Century Fluency Skills, Closing the Digital Divide: 7 things Education & Educators Need to Do, TTWWADI (That's The Way We Always Did It), Understanding Digital Kids and New Schools for a New Millennium.

Please note that Ian Jukes will be a keynote speaker at ECOO, in November, 2009. ECOO is the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario, and it is the ECOO subject council working with OTF on this workshop initiative. Consider attending ECOO as it will be an excellent follow-up to the three days of workshops.

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Some reading about technology that you may find interesting:

1. __The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century__, by Thomas Friedman 2. __What would Google do?__, by Jeff Jarvis 3. __Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything__, by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams 4. __Blown to bits: Your life, liberty and happiness after the digital explosion__, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis 5. __iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind__, by Dr Gary Smith

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