21st century digital kid
Technology changing schools’ approach to education
By Emily Schmall Correspondent
Malik Coburn, an eighth-grade student with an athletic build, was literate at age 3, at least digitally. He navigated a Mac computer before he learned to read.
Not since the invention of the printing press in 1440 has the paradigm for learning shifted in such a fundamental way, experts say.
The number of U.S. teens with access to computers spiked 45 percent in the past four years. Half of that number has created media content, and 83 percent of all 12-to-17-year-olds regularly play video games, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Coburn and his peers at North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School on Chicago’s South Side grew up with new media technology, and now through a $1.6 million after-school program administered by the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban School Improvement, they are using it to create documentaries and music videos, produce talk shows, write lyrics and host Web logs.
In October, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation announced a five-year, $50 million initiative to study how digital media is changing the way young people learn. Coburn’s school and Woodlawn High School — the University of Chicago’s two charter schools — are experimenting with a full integration of digital media in the classroom. Four days a week from 3:30 to 5 p.m., about 260 students attend clubs where they can practice filmmaking, publishing, music production and digital radio.
For a school-wide history fair, one digital media student chose the Ida B. Wells projects — and made a documentary film about their downfall. To learn how to balance ecology with development, students play the game Urban Science, developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in which players take on the roles of city planners.
Each student receives a laptop to be able to keep pace with students of more affluent backgrounds.
Nichole Pinkard, an associate professor at University of Chicago who oversees the program, believes equipping inner-city kids with digital media skills will enable them to flourish in the 21st-century workforce. Pinkard, who grew up humbly in Kansas City, said it was a computer teacher in her school who got her interested in computer science, a skill that helped her compete with more well-to-do classmates at Stanford, where she received her bachelor of arts degree.
“Our goal is to try to create opportunities. The ability to create, the implications of us doing this in an urban context, is essential for kids being able to do this in life,” Pinkard said.
Nationwide, academics and educators are watching the Chicago program closely to understand the implications of learning in a digital age. “We’re working on the basis of a proposition,” Jonathan Fanton, the MacArthur Foundation’s president, said at a recent panel discussion in Chicago, “that more learning is actually taking place outside the classroom.”
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