Student H, beta version

I have really struggled to write my response to the articles:
if you cannot engage young people in education then you will enrage them by Prensky (2005) and
digital natives or digital immigrants by Prensky (2001).  My thoughts on these topics have been all over the place and I am really struggling to pin them down and add some clever citations to them. Here follows my thoughts totally uncoordinated, I am still only a beta version!

• I am enraged that so much time is spent analysing whether ICT's have a place with modern day students when the reality is that millions of children do not even have a school to go to or attend, participate in any form of learning. Scores of other children that have no electricity and yet even more that do go to school but do not receive any education. Are we not wasting our time here surely it is logical that if you can expose students to ICT's and you have the resources to do so you have a moral obligation to. Another random thought and I will have to credit Wendy for this is that even in darkest Africa kids have mobiles.
• Is it a lack of proper pedagogical strategies that is causing the students boredom and longing for their technology which in most cases is as far as their pockets.
• On the topic of digital natives and digital immigrants, I can only say that I do not cope well with labels. Who do they think created all these technologies that the digital natives are playing with. I guess what I take from that is that those doing the creating did not do enough to roll out their creations to their own generation.

In conclusion I am still a beta version but would like to leave you with a few quotes:

"While we use the term ‘digital natives’ to describe the generation born after roughly 1980, not all young people fall into this category. Digital natives share a common global culture defined less by age than by their experience growing up immersed in digital technology. This experience affects their interaction with information technologies and information itself, as well as the ways they relate with one another, other people and institutions.
Reaping the benefits of digital tools, therefore, means more than just being born in a certain period
or having access to a laptop. For adolescents to realize the full promise of new technologies, three
divides must be bridged. The first has to do with basic access to these technologies and related
infrastructure, such as electricity; the second involves the skills needed to use the technologies once they become accessible; and the third stems from our limited understanding of how young people navigate the online world. Each of these divides exists in every society, but their effects are felt most acutely in the developing world."

from The State of the world children 2011  published by the UNICEF

ironically in the section of the paper called "Digital natives and the three divides to bridge" by by John Palfrey, Urs Gasser and Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvar University,
and Gerrit Beger of UNICEF.

the second quotation is closer to home and involves getting involved.

"CT in Everyday Learning: Teacher Online Toolkit

Following the Australian Government’s commitment of $2.4 billion to the Digital Education Revolution (DER), a number of initiatives have been funded through the ICT Innovation Fund (ICTIF) to support teachers and school leaders to more effectively integrate the use of information and communication technology into classroom teaching and learning."

You can download the ICT project brochure from the AAMT website.

I thank-you for taking the time to read my ramblings, will this metamorphosis make an academic writer out of me? I am not too sure.