Week 7 - Looking at “Digital Nation” and “Growing Up Online”

Your thoughts on multitasking.  Do you agree?  Can you multitask?  Do you disagree?

I feel like I could provide a great counterpoint to nearly all of what is presented in these documentaries… except for this one.  I have ADHD, I’ve only been taking medicine for it for a year now.  One of the things that I have learned by being on the medicine and is very difficult to admit:  I am not better at multitasking.

as much as I wish I was :-/

I'm sharing that I have ADHD because I know personally that it has shaped my mind (even now) into believing I am a great multitasking person, from my minds desire to be constantly engaged and stimulated.  But In reality, I feel like I can accomplish it all, but feeling and doing are not the same.  

Take for instance what I’ve done while this blog post: I’ve bought a video game from the app store, checked my email, looked on Amazon for computer parts, read other (unrelated) articles, and have had to constantly fight the urge to play that new video game.

“I’ll only check it out for 10 min” …5 Hours later... “I can finish that blog post in 10 min!”
(this is not the actual game, this is the worst game ever: Superman 64)

The hard results in Digital Nation are the same, (9:45 in) people accomplish their goals much slower when multitasking.  I could have been done this post much sooner if I had only focused on writing and researching it.  Is it the end of the world?  No, not really, I know I’ll get this done.  This may differ from person to person too.  I do think it is important to teach people that multitasking may not always be the best approach, depending on your situation.

Do parents of today have any idea what their kids are doing online?  Whose job is it to teach them the safety and digital responsibility?

This is a mixed bag of an answer.  I think that while it is really important for parents to be mindful of what their kids are doing online, most can’t.  I believe it was in Growing Up Online where the kid talks about how he knew when his dad was trying to track what he was doing, and just worked around that.  That had got to be very difficult for all parents, especially ones who are not into technology.  Who needs to teach them?  Everyone in their lives!  These kids need to know the stuff they are doing and saying online

Do video games serve a purpose in education or are they a waste of time?

I’ve written about the video game part before, and I really think this is a generational misconnection.  What people think of when they hear “video games” is nothing like what they would think of when they hear “learning in the classroom”.   We not live in an age where nearly all of us have a smartphone that we use for gaming.  Imagine turning that into a powerful tool in the classroom?

Digital Nation actually does a very good job outlining the social benefits of gaming online and trying shift peoples perception of what video games are and what they can do.  This is a good thing, gaming can be incredibly beneficial to students.

My overall reactions and thoughts on the documentaries 

The most prevalent parts of both Growing Up Online & Digital Nation are what I like to call “generational ethnocentrism”.  Most of the “problems” are things that an older generation just does not get.  This can be seen nearly universally and Dateline does a great job addressing those peoples fears of the unknown.

Don’t get me wrong, many parts in these videos are very, very important (the Cyberbulling part in Digital Nation comes to mind immediately).  My point is that people always think that their generation is the best.  They feel how their generation went about doing things is the best.  And finally feel as though their value system ought to be the standard for generations to come…but this simply isn’t realistic. 

Also: 80% of them are working

Facts that support my point: 35 minutes into Digital Nation we have the gentleman who wrote the book “The Dumbest Generation”.  Yes sir, your generation clearly has not done anything even remotely dumb.  While I don’t think his viewpoint really is that narrow (you have to have a dramatic title to sell books), he basically rattles off several reasons why this generation is the “dumbest”.  What are those reasons?  Oh, they all just happen to be things that if you have a device, you can look up in less than two minutes.  So yes, maybe this generation is not the best at repeating back memorized information… but doesn’t that open them up for more important higher thinking?