English Virtual Community

Yesterday La Nación newspaper published an article about online dangers for children and teens. According  to a survey conducted by LoJack and  Chicos.net , 56% of Argentine children between 12 and 15 years have shared personal information with strangers in a social network. And 29% have admitted that they have had direct contact with people they met through this medium. The article points out that banning surfing the net is not the way to prevent cyberbulling or sexting. It is advisable to teach children to share  neither personal information online about themselves  not their family without parental permission. Adults should help kids  become aware of the risks they may have if they use and interact with teachnology - PC, cell phone or webcam- without responsibility. Further reading: The article in Spanish Get Net Wise : About Kids' safety Wired Kids org Internet Safety

Latitude 42 Study Findings: Where Else Will Kids Think to Put the Web in the World? from latddotcom on Vimeo .

Last November I had the pleasure of attending a presentation given by Alejandro Piscitelli at Virtual Educa Congress . His presentation, massively attended by specialists on Information and Communication Technology (ICT), was about digital literacy and the Argentine Education system. It was really moving, sometimes ironic and sarcastic. Alejandro showed some acid humour when he opened his presentation with a slide showing an oven and the phrase “We are in the oven” (1) and continued describing with rich vocabulary the educational system resistance to put the use of ICT into practice. (1) It stands for the Spanish local colloquial expression “estamos en el horno” which means we are in a really difficult situation. Piscitelli’s book Alejandro wrote, among other titles, "Nativos Digitales" (2) . Although I had already read quite a lot about the topic in English, I decided to buy his book to know more about his opinion after having heard him at Virtual Educa. Luckily, I...

"A vision of students today" video has been recorded by the Digital Ethnography group of the Kansas University. They also recorded " Web 2.0... The Machine is Us". Enjoy it:

At present I am working as ICT coordinator. I am supposed to help teachers using Web 2.0 tools in their ESL (English as a Second Language) classes and it is not an easy task! I have to deal with two problems: 1- Students are already motivated to use digital technologies because they belong to the "thumb" or "digital" generation , but they think they are only going to play intereactive games at the computing lab. In Argentina, Digital natives associate Internet with having fun: chatting with friends and playing interactive games since the school has not incorporated computers and the Internet as a learning tool, so I have to make them realise that we are going to work and practise the Second Language (SL) - English in this case- using computers. 2-On the other hand, teachers are still "digital immigrants" and they are , in a way, reluctant to include computing and Internet in their classes. :-( Some of them are completely technophobes and others are a bit ...

Teenagers are called the thumb generation. Guess why? because they are typing text messages on their mobile phones most of their time. Multitasking is nother characteristic of digital natives. Do you want to read more about this? Read this interesting article by clicking on : http://ow.ly/aOuQ