Ooops. Today I arrived a little late for class. When I entered everyone was already seated with their desk/lap tops all ready for the lecture. Panicked a little since I've not finished my Learning Contract nor linked it. Luckily Huey Zher was kind enough to let us work on it in class. Lucky too that she showed me a way to transfer my incomplete LC (which was in MS Word) to Google Docs. Haha. The way to do it is to email the MS Word doc to your googlemail then view the doc there. To link, open Spectrum in Mozilla Firefox. I was really surprised that it was so easy, after having agonised over it for many an hour.
After doing all these we proceded to discuss our reading for the week, which I had read and highlighted but when it comes to giving opinions during discussion, I found it hard to locate what I wanted to bring up. Anyhow, after Ng and Yin volunteered their opinions, I found myself more focused and was able to add my own opinions. Bravo to both of them!
From my reading of the text “Do generational differences matter in instructional design” by Reeves, Thomas C, an important issue that arose was when he ask these questions:
- Will members of the Net Generation arrive in the workplace with advanced technology skills and strong information literacy as some have predicted?
- Or are their technology skills shallow and superficial?
After reflecting on these questions, I am of the opinion that for the general population of net-generation, even though they are familiar with technology, they may have only superficial knowledge of how it really works. To them technology is invented for their pleasure and leisure. They play games online, download music and movies, blog, use social networking sites etc. They only use what they want and ignore the rest and they don’t really use discretion or censor what they say or post online. Right now, what we need to teach them is, based on our discussion, Digital Citizenship. I feel that even though it does not seem like our duty but hey, teachers also teach students to clean the classroom, to pick up rubbish, teach them not to simply throw rubbish and other things which are not part of the curriculum. It is our duty to educate and not only to teach.
- Is their information literacy limited in fundamental ways that actually limits their powers
to reflect, reason, and make decisions?
I think this affects a large number of the net-generation based on my casual interaction and observation but I have not researched any empirical evidence that support this. So, further research and reading......
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