dmlcentral.net
Students: Panic Over Online Privacy, Identity is Overblown
Blogger Chris Sinclair attends the University of California, Irvine, and brings a youth perspective to DMLcentral.
Going on the Internet and reading blogs these days I feel like all I see are warnings about the evils of online networking, fleshing out a plethora of controversies involving social media sites. I find many of these articles boring and somewhat repetitive in their chastisement of Facebook and other sites and the Internet in general for suddenly making all of our “private” information “available.” How is this information “private” if a person has willingly made it public to a huge audience?… more
Reanimating education: ideas, questions, inspirations
Editor’s note: We asked student blogger Chris Sinclair to examine all the discourse, content, and conversation in and around the recent TEDxNYED event on education reform, curate it, and comment on it from a student’s perspective.
If I had to identify the most consistent narrative around this event, it would be the constraints of the contemporary, lecture-centered classroom environment and how it rewards those who excel at standardized testing, not those interested in actual learning. The speakers questioned the long-standing dynamic between lecturer and student, and suggested that the era of blind memorization of facts is DOA. Jeff Jarvis even went so far as to say, “This (the lecture) is bull****” (fittingly, of course, in lecture format).… more
A Digital Native Reflects on the Concept
There is an assumption that digital natives are naturally predisposed to understanding how to use computers and technology, just because we grew up with the Internet, texting, and emailing. I'm 21 years old, I am a so-called digital native, but my experience has been that the concept of digital literacy is far more meaningful than the concept of digital native - and it has little to do with age or any broad generational differences.… more