ETHOS WINTER 2013
A Digital Natives, Disruptive Schooling and other Brainteasers by Dr. Maria Avgerinou, Director of Educational Technology and e-Learning
s Bob Pearlman, one of the key leaders in U.S. educational reform points out (2010), a casual walk into any new brick-andmortar schools across the U.S., reveals that despite the elaborate architectural designs and the wiring for educational technology integration, classrooms remain designed for teachers to stand in front of the students, thus still reflecting schooling as invented in the 19th century. Since those bygone and distant past times however, the world has developed in such diverse directions and created new and particularly complex demands for citizenship, college and careers that it is no longer possible to be accommodated by old
learning environments associated with old learning paradigms. Indeed, “we are on the threshold of a tipping point in public education,” (Kay, 2010, xiii). The Partnership for the 21st Century Skills (2009) emphasizes that in addition to core subject knowledge, such skills as information and communication, inter-personal and self-directional, as well as being well versed with the technologies of this millennium, both from the consumer and the creator’s standpoints, are critical in order to prepare students as life-long learners to deal successfully with the demands of the ever changing world of the post-industrial era of information revolution. These learning outcomes not only necessitate schools to capitalize on the affordances of new technologies, but also to utilize more learner-centric pedagogies which focus on the newly emerged, idiosyncratic profile of the digital learner (Prensky, 2001). As a result, we have wit-
Current page Top: The skills of the 21st Century Learner Bottom: Faculty participating in an i2Flex instructional design consultation session at ACS Athens