Following up from my last post about the boomer divide, there is another good piece by David Puttnam in the Guardian about children’s experience of technology. The opening quote sums up the main points pretty well:

At a recent digital education conference in San Francisco, one of the more memorable remarks quoted came from a child: “Whenever I go into class, I have to power down.” That roughly translates as: “What I do with digital technology outside school - at home, in my own free time - is on a completely different level to what I’m able to do at school. Outside school, I’m using much more advanced skills, doing many more interesting things, operating in a far more sophisticated way. School takes little notice of this and seems not to care.”

A large part of what Puttnam is talking about comes from a recent publication by Demos called Their Space, which researched and examines the value of digital culture in everyday life, particularly for school children. The main, and not surprising finding was that “the use of digital technology has been completely normalised by this generation,and it is now fully integrated into their daily lives.”

This shouldn’t be big news, but it still is to many of the people in the higher echelons of educational institutions. Of course they all know about “eLearning”, they might even have heard of Web 2.0 and YouTube. But there is huge divide, as Puttnam points out, between the way children understand and use these technologies and how the supervising generation perceive them.

I had the pleasure of chatting with one of the report’s authors, Hannah Green, last year as part of her background research. I’m not taking credit for this (as many people are of the same opinion) but this quote really echoed everything we’ve been discussing within Omnium for a long time:

The current generation of young people will reinvent the workplace, and the society they live in.They will do it along the progressive lines that are built into the technology they use everyday – of networks, collaboration, co-production and participation. The change in behaviour has already happened. We have to get used to it,accept that the flow of knowledge moves both ways and do our best to make sure that no one is left behind.

I really recommend you read Their Space, you can download the PDF for free (and whilst you’re at it, why not read it on screen rather than wasting trees printing it out).