What do we do with all the new technology that students have access to? This may be one of the key areas that Instructional Designers may be overlooking. Teachers and other instructors have a tendency to believe that new technologies simply offer a "new" way to do "the same old thing". (Larry Cuban comes to this conclusion after interviewing many secondary and post-secondary instructors for his book "Oversold and Underused".) When I think of my experience interacting with students at the high school level, (I am a high school teacher librarian) I see that technology and the students' adoption of social networking applications and their embracing of digital content and authoring has placed them in a different reality than that of most of their teachers. Designing learning environments for these students that do not factor in this new reality will fall short of the students' expectations. (This thinking is a reflection of the "Digital Native/ Digital Immigrant"[pdf download] (Prensky 2001) paradigm that is much discussed in K-12 circles these days.) For more on this, read a recent article by Prensky on the ASCD site.
Lots more by Marc here.
