However, I think there’s a lack of interrogation of some ideas that have gained currency - for example, the Prensky concept of digital natives is one that I believe is flawed but is taken as reality in one of the papers.

I mentioned some Australian research by academics from Griffith University and the University of Melbourne in a previous post which challenges the digital native assumption.

Further, there is still a digital divide, and there are also philosophies of education that do not preference digital learning or the use of ICT and in fact discourage it in the early years of learning.

This means that we are not going to have a generation of digital natives and that we will be dealing with students with varied experiences in the use of ICT. As we dive into the digital education revolution, we need to keep these complexities in mind.

There’s the introduction to the proof of concept, the findings, and the demonstrator. This project is not yet guaranteed any further funding - it’s an excellent idea and would be of significant benefit to the education and training community.

What the researchers found is not earthshattering - in some ways their study raises a ’so what’ kind of response, but for anyone interested in why 100,000 or more people are sending each other short messages a number of times a day, it is enlightening. The researchers analysed (using various methods) more than 1 million posts made in Twitter over a two month period. Users used Twitter for 1. Daily chatter, 2. Conversation, 3. Sharing information/URLs 4. Reporting news.

Twitter user categories were: Information Source, Friends, Information Seeker - and an individual user could fall into more than one category and use Twitter posts for more than one reason.

As I said, not earthshattering, but the users are clearly finding such services useful and relevant to engaging in their communities of interests/friends.

With Vivaty you are able to experience you and your friends (as long as your friends are also including Vivaty in their Facebook applications) in 3D. Chat, walk around, sit on the couch. It’s a nice touch and removes a lot of the issues associated with open virtual environments like Second Life where a lot of odd avatars seem to hang around. In the Facebook/Vivaty world you are just interacting with your friends, or if you want to, you can go to a social room to meet new friends.

I think this kind of integration is a winner - what we all want is our own personalised environment where all our stuff comes together. The Vivaty approach brings the 3D world into the 2D space using your pre-existing personalised Facebook.

Advertisers already complain that they can’t reach the teen market through TV and have to go online and use new methods like viral marketing, internet only ads and concentrate on brand cred and niche rather than broad reach.

TWEB producers are providing that demographic to advertisers by providing content that delivers complementary but integrated content on TV and web, and then engages the viewer/participant community through incorporating user generated content into the actual media - that is, consumers become producers, viewers become creators.

I wrote awhile ago about short dramas being delivered by mobile phone and snack attack learning and this has taken a digital footprint forward with ‘Scorched‘ coming to free-to-air TV very soon. Along with the ‘traditional’ 90 minute telemovie, it’s supported by webisodes (web-only content), YouTube strands, and social networking sites. Along with those, are ‘real’ websites related to the fictional people and organisations that appear in the show, and user generated content - UGC for the initiated - which is comprised of reports from those watching the show about the issues in the show.

This combination of web, UGC contributions and community building is not new, but it’s the first time it’s really gone mainstream in Australia with a free-to-air network giving it a go. I would guess that the network is as interested in whether it delivers the demographic to advertisers as whether TWEB is an interesting new use of technology, but for educators the potential is fantastic.

The topic itself is one that can be effectively used for a whole range of educative purposes - the show ‘Scorched’ is set in the near future (2012) with Australia facing a drought crisis (hmm, that sounds familiar) and we’re at level 12 water restrictions. The web-based content is utterly plausible. TWEB participants can upload their own reports about the impact of no water on their own situation. For those looking at economic or environmental impacts of global warming, this a rich seam of issues to mine. For those teaching media, here’s a way to provide a ‘real’ experience of reporting on a crisis.

For those of you familiar with the serious game World without Oil, Scorched could be used in a similar way.

The other implication for educators is what this complex layering of media and narrative means for those who work in the media business. Linear narrative using a single media is one thing - and that’s what’s commonly used for TV drama; but what we have in the Scorched example is significantly more complex and will require some clever teaching in creative writing units and media production programs to provide writers and producers to the industry that can develop compelling content for this different kind of narrative landscape.

The nice thing about it is that it’s browser-based - so no huge downloads, no requirement to have admin access to your machine so that you can download and so on. Even though I’m on a broadband connection Second Life is still a bit stuttery, but SmallWorlds runs nicely. It’d be interesting to see what it’s like under load, and on a dial-up connection.

It’s been developed by a New Zealand company with US venture capital.

I can’t get it to work yet, but I’m trying, because it seems like such a good idea.