We'll tie up some loose ends from the last couple of weeks and then begin working toward Project 1.

Course objectives associated with today's class:

• Explain how social institutions affect and are in turn affected by such technologies.
• Describe how technological change creates differences between generations in terms of their ethical standards, interests and learning preferences.
• Use software tools and online resources to practice creative problem-solving and communicate your solutions and reflections.
• Use a variety of problem-solving techniques to address ill-defined problems within the domains of this course and beyond.

Finishing up from last week...

We'll finish the work of creating a causal flow diagram (Jones p. 95) to repesent the complexities associated with plagiarism on a college campus. (It might be interesting to check out a causal flow diagram last year's 296 class came up with regarding email privacy and monitoring.)

Let's briefly discuss some of what you're getting from JSB's book... What are his major themes? How does he describe learning?

Today's work

You all grew up with access (at least occasionally) to computers and video games. Your parents did not. Some have claimed that that fact has warped the way you think and learn. Is that really true? How can we tell for sure?

Let's do a quick discussion on hypothesis testing. Jones doesn't go into much detail on how to come up with good hypotheses. Here are links to 1 2 3 sites which might provide insight. From the first:

Generating hypotheses: Keep these principles in mind when generating hypotheses. The attitude is to look for situations where the hypothesis can fail, and to make it produce clear and precise predictions about the world. ... Part of the reason we want to have our hypothesis be incompatible with certain outcomes is so we can set up situations where those outcomes are likely in an attempt to falsify the hypothesis. Only one counter-example rules out a hypothesis, but it takes an infinite (or nearly infinite) number of positive instances to prove it true.

For homework, you were to have looked over some of the ideas proposed in the book Growing Up Digital by Don Tapscott. We'll start with a general discussion over Tapscott's assertions. Do they ring true to you?

Working in groups, we'll tease out a list of testable statements about the differences between the way your generation learns versus the way your parents learn. Put these into a Moodle wiki which will allow groups to refine each others' ideas as we work.

Then, we'll work through Twitchspeed - Keeping Up With Young Workers by Marc Prensky which promotes a similar view and try to add to our list of statements.

Then we'll turn these statements into multiple-choice questions that we can ask on an online survey. You'll type your proposed questions into a Moodle forum set up for that purpose. Jim will sift through your questions and generate a survey using Zoomerang, and will email you the URL for you to send out to prospective survey-takers.

For Next Week's Class

• Contact 8 people you know and ask them to complete the survey before next Tuesday. I will email you the URL of the survey tomorrow (Thursday) for you to send on to your friends and family. Of the 8 people, 4 should be of your generation, and four should be over 30. (If you want to solicit more than 8, that's great, but please keep the ages balanced.
• Read Jones Chapter 11 again. We'll be using the hypothesis testing technique in class to examine the assertion that you and your parents are substantially different.
• Read JSB Chapter 8 for more on the ways that technology might (or might not) change university learning.
• Explore other writings by Marc Prensky on his site.
• Suggested blog entry: Reflect on how you and your parents are similar/different with regard to the ways you think and learn, and the role technology does/doesn't play.