I'm still buzzing from the fantastic Digital Media & Learning Conference in Long Beach last week. I'll report back on some of the sessions I attended over the course of the week, but I wanted to kick it off with this inspirational talk by Dr. Elizabeth Losh.
Losh is director of academic programs at University of California, San Diego and is writing a book called Early Adopters: The Instructional Technology Movement and the Myth of the Digital Generation.
Parents are bombarded with messages from the media about digital media, she said. They're either made to fear that strangers will turn their children turning into monsters, or feel guilty that they're not spending enough money on educational gadgets. To that, I would add that mainstream media also lumps student-related digital media into one huge time-wasting, brain-zapping nemesis that must be fought and conquered, with little exploration of how and why the medium might actually feed the learning process.
To that end, here are Losh's 10 principles of digital learning for parents.