Teaching digital commuters, not tourists

This is a metaphor I used in our book, MySpace Unraveled, in which the commuters, approach the Web and social networking entirely differently from the way we adults do – kind of like the way commuters and tourists approach huge public spaces like Penn Station in New York City. I suggest that the tourists can't shape the entire public discussion, set all the policy, and teach entirely from their perspective. Commuter input is needed. Building on that is a blog item by tech educator David Warlick in TechLearning.com. After talking with Karl Leif Bates, Duke University's manager of research communications (kind of an interpreter for the public of current research), David blogs about the different ways two generations of scientists approach science. For one thing, Bates told him, the younger ones collaborate electronically much more – physical distances are nothing to them. The second observation was *really* interesting: Warlick writes that Bates told him "science used to be reductionist in nature. I asked what that meant, and he said that science was about drilling down to components, cutting out and examining bits of the world, reducing it to its barest fundamentals. He said that the younger scientists spend more time synthesizing, that they seem much more interested in systems and networks, not so much how things operate independently, but how they operate as part of a larger organism, ecosystem, or cosmos."

Check out how David uses this as a metaphor for how computer skills are taught in schools. And I will use it as a metaphor for the way we have taught online safety so far. We can no longer separate it out as a "curriculum" – not in teaching digital commuters, for whom there is no distinction between "online" and "offline." Online safety on the social Web will not work if it's reductionist. But tell me what *you* think, via anne@netfamilynews.org or, ideally, for all to see at BlogSafety.com.