This video is so fundamental for us as parents, as managers and as educators.
In this video we see John Seely Brown talking about the gaming disposition:
Gamers are incredibly bottom-line: they want to be measured because they want to improve.
Nichole Pinkard continues by saying that:
I don’t think any kid is born digitally native. They all consume digital media, but they don’t all go on to produce digitally. Digital talents can always be traced back to someone or something that inspired them to develop.
Diana Rothen points our attention to the fact that previous century learning was about learning the content. She continues to say:
21st century learning is more about the tools and the skills of remaking that content and becoming the creator and the producer.
Mimi Ito talks about how this alters our relationship towards formal and informal learning:
We should not abandon formal learning, but rather aspire to have informal learning and formal learning working together in a much more coordinated way.
Katie Salen strikes the balance on how and when to apply digital media in education that resembles the viewpoint of Kevin Kelly:
We have laptops so we can put them away when it is actually not the best tool to be learning with
Finally, Henry Jenkins offers a different view 21st century skills, which is related to the multiple intelligences that are mentioned by Charles Handy in the early 90s and now brought back to life by Ken Robinson:
We should not reduce them to skills for the workplace and skills for creativity. We should be looking at creativity and engagement and the full range of experiences that will be needed to be involved in the future.
My Thoughts…
In my humble opinion, we are discovering that companies who are looking at the gaming generation for who they really are (i.e. bottom-line oriented, if I’m not learning it ain’t fun) will leapfrog in the digital economy. Companies who hire people from this generation and try to push them into the command-and-control format, will produce linear results (the world as we know it).
What’s new though is that the industrial revolution mindset will not only be punished in terms of moderate productivity (low motivation, sheepish people, learned helplessness, alienation, … pretty much ‘work’ as we know it), but on top of that, the digital economy will brutally punish these companies economically.
