Research and Theory

In a world dominated by digital technology, our students need to gain fluency in reading and writing via digital means. To be literate, engaged citizens, they need to be skilled users of the Internet, and strong communicators in a variety of media and situations. They need to become comfortable and skilled at keyboarding, and they need to develop a new range of literacies including media and digital. Even apart from the urgent need to help our students learn to negotiate a complex, technology-driven world, we can use digital forms of expression to improve the most basic skills of writing.  

In classrooms across the world, teachers and students are exploring the use of social media including blogs and wikis; audio expression including podcasts; image-based writing with digital photographs, drawings and graphics; and multimedia expression. 

One of the early hurdles in getting digital learning into the classroom is the belief that students are "wasting time" on the Internet. More and more research is showing, however, that the time students are spending online is far more valuable than people realize.

A major study financed by the MacArthur Foundation on Digital Media and Learning found that the digital world inhabited by today’s youth is creating new opportunities for them to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills and experiment with new forms of self-expression. The regularly go online to extend their social worlds and engage in self-directed learning.

 

 

Youth today use online media to:

 

You can read a summary or the full 30-page White Paper on youth learning and the internet in the attachments below. 

 

Here's a video of Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and lead author of the Digital Youth Project.