Educating the Dragon

I’ve begun to read ‘Growing up digital by Don Tapscott, as recommended by both David Warlick and Jennifer Correiro. But I must confess that even as I read the first few paragraphs my mind hit overdrive, and as is my way I began processing all over again the thoughts and ideas I had heard about telling a new story and the Net Generation. I thought about the kids in my school, in my class. I thought about the trouble John Key got himself into over the ‘underclass’. In
New Zealand, you see there is no class system. It is a classless democracy with the shining bright lie that, in fact there is a class system, doesn’t work in the conventional sense but it is there all the same.

I digress….

“…there is a dirct relationship between family income and access to computers and the Net. This correlation also exists between the higher- and lower-income schools… our research shows that the digital divide is actually widening, not disappearing. As the new technology trickles into poorer neighbourhoods and schools, the better of children are leapfrogging others- getting not only better access, but a wider range of services, faster access, ther best technology, and, most importantly, increasing motivation, skills and knowledge. This not only exacerbates the fluency gap but also the gap in different economic classes’ capacity to learn and have successful lives. Have-not become know-nots and do-nots.”

David spoke of his schooling and how 80% ish of his class went to work in the mill to do repetitive work, closely supervised. It got me thinking about what are we preparing our students for, are we assuming, and grooming them accordingly, they will be working at Watties. Yes these are Net Gen kids but to be honest, because of their socio-economic position are we not in danger of ‘writing them off’ in a “Look at their dad to see their future” sort of way.

Funding is different for decile 1 schools, and rightly so. But I ask the question, is it enough? If we are hoping against hope for these kids to be ‘successful’, whatever that looks like in the future, we’d better be supporting them in their learning Web 2.0. For whatever their future holds, straight up, it’ll be measured in gigabytes.

Those key competencies are great, and they have their place, just like the subjects, but there is a whole lot of digital literacy et al. out there that needs to be grasped and utilised if these kids are to be Life-long learners.