Are Kids Getting Smarter with Smart Phones?
In Chapter 8, “Are Kids Getting Dumber as Their Phones Get Smarter?” Reed calls into question the critiques of educators’ uses of technologies: “Instead of focusing on the alleged dehumanizing effects of computers in the classroom, or fetishizing the technology itself as the sole solution, it is far more useful to focus on the real issue with hi-tech (and not so hi-tech) education.
Real concerns about digitizing education take us back to issues of social fairness, equality and digital inclusion, as linked to creative teaching” (p. 171).
In a paper of approximately 500 words (two double-spaced pages), apply one or two outside sources and draw on insights from Chapter 8 in Digitized Lives: Culture, Power, and Social Change in the Internet Era and the article “Young Citizens and Civic Learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age” to do the following:
Think about your experience with online education. How has “equality and digital inclusion” made possible (or made difficult) your ability to participate?
Evaluate the connections between Reed’s observations and the analysis in “Young Citizens and Civic Learning” of how young citizens’ identity styles and learning opportunities have evolved and become enabled by various online and offline environments.