Portal:Digital Education

What is Digital Education?

Technology has always been an important factor for education, but the rapid development of Internet and digital technology over the past decade is changing more than just the equipment used in the classroom: kids' learning styles and school behavior are constantly being shaped by the growing presence of the Internet. This section examines digital education and the need for digital literacy while also looking at the pros/cons and problems/solutions of digital education.

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Benefits of Digital Education “The Peak Group, an education technology research and consulting firm, expects that more than 1 million students will take advantage of "virtual schools" this school year. Another research firm, Eduventures, predicted the online distance learning market will grow more than 38 percent in 2004, taking in $5.1 billion in revenue” [1] Read More... Problems But wait, this isn’t the end of the education story. Let’s look at Sara’s life again. Sara’s a girl who knows what she wants. She’s juggling three sports each school year, ballet classes, and babysitting duty for her younger brother. What’s more, she wants to take a full load of rigorous academic courses her junior year, and there just isn’t time… The temptation for students in high-pressure-cooker environments to cheat has always existed. However, in the new technological age, there are more options for them to do so. Touches on graphing calculators, cell phone photos of tests, survey statistics on cheating and who cheats in high schools, plagiarism, etc.[2] Dictating notes into an ipod, listen during test [3] Read More... Solutions Creating a database turnitin.com where everyone’s paper is compared against each other [4] And maybe the solution isn’t a quick-fix legal regulation. Maybe it requires cultural change, especially in wealthy high pressure cooker world where each kids feels obligated to do 7 sports and activities. Maybe we should instituted regulation that would not turn the tide of cheating (which is a symptom), but which would turn the tide of cultural mores and cultural message/tradition (which is the actually cause/disease). Read More...

Narratives Sara is a girl who knows what she wants. She’s juggling three sports each school year, ballet classes, and babysitting duty for her younger brother. What’s more, she wants to take a full load of rigorous academic courses her junior year, and there just isn’t time in her schedule for a PE class. The course offerings have been finalized over the summer, and she discovers that PE isn’t her only problem: her chemistry and US history classes are offered during the same period, and she’ll have to choose between the two. 10 years ago, Sara would just have to watch her perfectly planned schedule go up in flames. Now, she has access to more teachers than those who walk the halls of her high school and more choices than are offered in the recycled paper course catalog in the main office. She can go online. Read More... How the Internet Fosters High Quality Information The internet has fundamentally changed the way how digital natives create, distribute, access and use information. Creation: Everybody with a computer and internet access can be a publisher on the internet. Information is no longer created by a small group of hierarchal organized professionals but by integrating the a large number of digital natives. Digital information on the internet is mostly not reviewed by institutional reviewers such as newspaper editors. Read More... Relevant Research and Articles Teach-nology In Digital Age, More T's Are Crossed Poorly, Boston Globe, May 2007 AMA's Initial Report on Youth, Gaming, and Addiction, July 2007 Digital Education Engage Me or Enrage Me - What Today's Learners Demand, Prensky (2005) Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, Andrew Churches 2008 Information and Communication Technologies ICTs and Learning style, Andrew Churches 2007 Digital Literacy Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy practices in the production of a MySpace profile (Perkel, 2006) The School of Second Life (Edutopia, 2006) Why Heather Can Write (Technology Review, 2004) Learning 2.0 - "an online self-discovery program that encourages the exploration of web 2.0 tools and new technologies" Read More...