Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner Video
1. What are specific ethical issues you see kids struggling when they use digital media?
Privacy, ownership, identity, credibility and trustworthiness. When children don’t see the consequences of their actions, they have a tendency to take the easiest way out possible.
2. How is our sense of identity changing in the digital world? How can adults learn from kids and guide them at the same time?
The digital world creates a paper copy of who we are, and this can be the truth, or it might be an exaggeration of the truth, or just plain o false. A digital identification is who we see ourselves are, not necessarily who we are. When in a classroom a child might not feel right critiquing another child’s work, but online there is this disconnect from the ‘real’ world where a comment is just a comment made by a faceless name, it does not bare any connection to the person actually writing the comment. Adults should be actively learning from the children as they are going through this process. As they are learning from the child, they can also monitor and enrich the child’s learning with their own knowledge on appropriate social behaviours that the children might not be exposed to on a regular basis in the ‘real’ world.

3. Digital tools make it extremely easy to communicate with anyone in the world. What are the opportunities and challenges for kids?
It gives them the opportunity to learn from different cultures around the world. This can be difficult because of the differences in language, culture, customs, beliefs, etc. What is said isn’t always what is intended, and what might be acceptable to say in one country might not be in another.
4. Do you think digital media are having a negative impact on kids' attention span? What are the implications for home and school?
I can see some possible attention span linked consequences to the vast knowledge of digital media. More bells and whistles means more distractions, math with paper and pencil now becomes 3D and intense with colours, music, sounds and videos. Everything else can then become boring. For home the children become distracted in trying to complete a simple task, they become so use to doing 5 things at once on the computer that simply reading their English novel doesn’t seem fitting enough for them. In school the children are forced to be in an environment that is structured, when online there is not much, if any structure to what is being done. You are simply free to get lost in cyberspace.
5. How does teaching and learning change in a world where information is at your fingertips?
Instead of teaching the knowledge, teachers now take on a new role as coach making sure that the information the students are getting is appropriate and guiding them in the right directions to find appropriate ‘good’ information.