John Palfrey offers a model of how digital natives process the news. The idea is to describe the difference between those of us who get up in the morning and read the Times (or Grand Forks Herald) cover to cover and those of us who go online and take a different approach. I really like the model (graze, dive, talk back) and I would really like to think it was true of high school and college students today.
However, I would really like to see the data on this one. I think the way Palfrey describes the habits of 21st century learners (if present high school and college students are considered 21st century learners) is idealistic and probably inaccurate. My students are more likely to IM and use a cell phone that I am, but I would bet very few of them followed up on what I could consider a legit news story today. I did – this is how I located the link used in this post. So, I am saying I think educators are more likely to at least “dive” and possibly “talk back” than their students. What I would like to see is educators extending this practice to include their students. As I read the research on teacher technology skills, the most frequent limitation that characterizes new teachers is that they apply skills to benefit their own learning and do not extend these same advantages to their students. So, I think a more appropriate criticism, since this piece seems to be about who is out of date, out of touch, etc., is that educators don’t involve their students in the practices they employ for their own information needs.
