Authors
Steve Anderson, Anne Balsamo
Publication date
2008
Journal
Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected
Pages
241-259
Description
How can we gain perspective on the contemporary scene of digital learning? In the global era commonly known as the early twenty-first century, this cultural landscape is far from flat—it is marked by spikes of intense technological engagement and valleys of cultural impoverishment and illiteracy. Accounts of technological innovations dominate the headlines, while the stories of the illiterate and the technologically disenfranchised are relegated to back pages. This is the doubled reality of the dynamic educational scene of contemporary global culture: it has been transformed and is being continually transformed by the wide-scale use of new digital technologies. At the same time, it is a place where timeworn inequities stubbornly persist despite the concerted efforts of educational reformers. We agree with cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, when he writes:“the future is already here, it’s just distributed unevenly.” In an effort to create a vantage point from which to gain a perspective on this dynamically shifting scene, we begin with a speculative scenario of a future-that-does-not-yet-exist assembled from science fictional narrative fragments of the present. We deploy this speculative narrative as a critical technique that enables us to probe the changes in a generation’s disposition. 1 For the purposes of this essay, we call the members of this generation “students.” We identify ourselves as the “teachers.” There are many questions to consider in tracing the contours of the dispositional change of this generation born in a digital age, any of which could serve as the organizing topic for a robust investigation and analysis. For example: How do …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
S Anderson, A Balsamo - Digital youth, innovation, and the unexpected, 2008