I am older than most of my teachers and professors and well beyond their education in my specialty, but there are always unique features and insights to every subject I take and, most importantly, I can never get enough of the “educational process.” I simply love learning.

Now, I must strongly disagree with most of your original post and most of the others. Though thoughtful and insightful you (and me) are dinosaurs. We are. I have a 14 year old grand-daughter who is on another planet, quite literally sometimes. The children in her generation do learn differently. You think you can understand but, you simply are not “wired” to do this. There has been a paradigm (I don’t like that word) change that I have just begun to notice. It is almost as if cave men were brought into this century. You may not like this, I don’t, and that really, is of no importance.

It is difficult to describe these changes. I have no empirical evidence of this, but I know it just as surely as I know I am typing this, in nice English, instead of texting in macros and broke English. My generation especially, as well as My 40 year old son, simply can not and will not be able to, understand what is happening. I think Toffler’s third wave is here and is overpowering us all without our knowledge.

I am not asking you to believe me, just go to some teenager who trusts you but is not related. Try and have an intellectual conversation, and you will find you are on different wave lengths, completely different frequencies. I have been studying this phenomena for some time and the pedagogy is alien to me. I am not aware of as many inputs as these young folks. They do learn differently, the stimulations are different. You simply can not suggest there are similarities between the mechanical usage of the way a young person interfaces with a computer and an adult of 30. None of us speak that language, the digital age has finally outdistanced most who are 25 or so and older.

Please have an open mind. Study, empirically, what I am suggesting. You will be surprised, I promise.

In terms of the value of social media in education there are two things that I know are true: 1) that we find community in it and 2: WE DO USE IT. Facebook and wiki’s for example, are being used by most college students to conduct class projects. In terms of scientific evidence, the Just Think Foundation – a non-profit dedicated to media education – is planning to release findings on the first study on media literacy proving that it does have a positive impact on the critical thinking skills in middle school students.

In terms of the difference between natives and immigrants, I think that social media gives us speed and power. Beleive it or not,
“natives” do expect information as it happens as well as the ability to have our inputs heard. If as educators you can’t see that, well, than, I would call you an “immigrant”….

Even from a business standpoint ( drawing from my business degree and internship), ecorporations are changing to meet the demands of social media users. To say that the webcasts are the same as print publication is unrealistic. The internet has changes society, and as educators I beleive that you have to change with it.

I agree with you about the importance of separating the fads from the fundamentals. Difficult at times, but there is an ethical imperative for us (educators, in a formal and informal sense) to do so.

Thanks for sharing the resources you compiled; I’m honoured and humbled to be included.

I’ve compiled a summary page of different critiques of Prensky’s “digital natives / digital immigrants” slogan on my learning evolves wiki, here

It’s hard work but important to distinguish between the attention grabbing fads and deeper, more fundamental changes.