Pew Internet Readings
For next week, we will read from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Please read the first article (Internet-savvy students), and then another article of your choice.
Please post responses underneath this message.
- The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools
- The Ever-Shifting Internet Population (access & digital divide)
- College Students and the Web
- The Internet Goes to College
- The Internet and Education
- Teenage Life Online
Please post responses underneath this message.
posted by kurt at 11:52 AM
4 Comments:
yes -- you should read the 37 pp .pdf
The questions researchers asked in their researches tell us a lot about then and now. Larry Cuban, in his celebrated “Teachers and Machines,” published in 1986, asked “should computers be used in classrooms” (p. 82) and now researchers like Levin and Arafeh are trying to find "the widening gap between internet-savvy students and their schools.” When Cuban asked his questions in the 1980s, computers were very expensive and most families would not be able to afford to buy one. Also using computers as teaching and learning tools were questioned since they were mainly used for programming. Now computers and the internet, with many powerful applications to facilitate communication and interaction, are viewed by many scholars as a necessary tool for learning.
As computers become more powerful and less expensive, their influences in teaching and learning also increase. Those who have more accessibility to computers will have more chances to facilitate learning in different ways (virtual textbook, virtual tutor, virtual study group, virtual guidance counselor, virtual locker, backpack and notebook, etc). Levin’s research not only shows that there is a widening gap between internet-savvy students and their schools, but also indicates that the learning gap between different social classes will be widen as well.
i thought this was kind of interesting:
* 24% of online teens have created their own Web pages.
compare that with students in the school of ed, where it's much lower.
more interesting facts:
The families in our sample, selected
because their children go online, are
relatively upscale: 54% have a yearly
income of more than $50,000 (compared
to 35% of all American parents); 44% are
college graduates (compared to 27% of
parents in the overall population). Our
sample is slightly older than the
population of all online parents, mainly
because parents of children who are 12 to
17 are generally older than parents of
younger children, who would all be
included in a general sample of online
parents.
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