For your first discussion board post, you will need to answer the following questions thoroughly and thoughtfully in order to earn the full 20 points. The discussion post should be at least 300 words; if you need to, type your response out on a Word doc, then copy and paste your response into the discussion forum. Each response should be at least two-three sentences long.

After having read “Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web” by Alia Wong, answer the following questions in detail:

1. What is Wong’s overall argument?

   What are you being asked to believe, think, or do?
   Provide a quote that leads you to believe that is her argument.

2. After reading her entire article, what part was the most convincing?

   Why?
   Provide a quote.

3. On the contrary, after reading Wong’s article, which part was the most confusing or least convincing?’

   Why?
   Provide a quote.

4. Lastly, based on your understanding of audience (as we briefly discussed in class on Tuesday), who do you believe Wong is trying to persuade?

   Who is likely reading an article about technology in education?

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EDUCATION

Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web

MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP

When Reuben Loewy took up his �rst teaching gig in 2012, he had a major

revelation: e digital revolution has dramatically transformed the way that kids

perceive reality.

Perhaps that makes the 55-year-old teacher sound like a dinosaur. What he

discovered is, after all, one of the most obvious realities shaping education policy

and parenting guides today. But, as Loewy will clarify, his revelation wasn’t simply

that technology is overhauling America’s classrooms and rede�ning childhood and

adolescence. Rather, he was hit with the epiphany that efforts in schools to embrace

these shifts are, by and large, focusing on the wrong objectives: equipping kids with

fancy gadgets and then making sure the students use those gadgets appropriately

Today’s schools are focusing on boosting kids’ technological pro�ciency and
warning them about the perils of the web. But something critical is missing from
this education.

ALIA WONG APRIL 21, 2015

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alia-wong/

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and effectively. Loewy half-jokingly compares the state of digital learning in

America’s schools to that of sex ed, which, as one NYU education professor

describes it, entails “a smattering of information about their reproductive organs

and a set of stern warnings about putting them to use.”

Indeed, although many of today’s teens are immersed in social media, that doesn’t

mean “that they inherently have the knowledge or skills to make the most of their

online experiences,” writes Danah Boyd in her 2014 book It’s Complicated: e

Secret Lives of Networked Teens. Boyd, who works as a principal researcher at

Microsoft Research, argues that “the rhetoric of ‘digital natives'” is dangerous

because it distorts the realities of kids’ virtual lives, the result being that they don’t

learn what they need to know about online living. In other words, it falsely assumes

that today’s students intrinsically understand the nuanced ways in which

technologies shape the human experience—how they in�uence an individual’s

identity, for example, or how they advance and stymie social progress—as well as

the means by which information spreads thanks to phenomena such as algorithms

and advertising. Loewy decided that this void could be eliminated with an honest,

interdisciplinary high-school curriculum for the digital age—a program that would

fundamentally shift how schools address kids’ virtual experiences.

Educational institutions across the board are certainly embracing (or at least

acknowledging) the digital revolution, adopting cutting-edge classroom technology

and raising awareness about the perils and possibilities of the Internet. On the one

end are the movement’s champions—the schools where every child has an iPad or

the education departments with bureaucrats who go by fancy titles like “Director of

Innovative Learning.” In some school districts, virtual courses are a prerequisite for

graduation, and it’s become almost cliché for teachers to incorporate Minecraft into

their instruction. Meanwhile, schools are phasing out physical textbooks,

sometimes replacing them with arti�cially intelligent software. It’s hardly surprising

that one-third of the country’s students in grades six through 12 use school-

provided mobile devices to support coursework, according to a 2014 report by the

nonpro�t Project Tomorrow.  

On the other end are the skeptics, among them the adults who fear that kids are

being thrusted into a world of cyberbullies and pedophiles. A 2012 Pew Research

survey of roughly 800 U.S. parents and their teenage children found that eight in

10 parents are concerned about their kids’ Internet privacy, while seven in 10 said

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/what-schools-should-teach-kids-about-sex/387061/

http://www.danah.org/books/ItsComplicated

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/one-to-one-program-rollout-jac-de-haan

http://www.ccsd59.org/innovative-learning-and-communications/

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/virtual-education-genuine-benefits-or-real-time-demerits/385674/

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/the-case-against-minecraft/385678/

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/teaching-in-the-age-of-minecraft/385231/

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-death-of-textbooks/387055/

http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/SU13DigitalLearningPlaybook_StudentReport.html

http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/11/20/parents-teens-and-online-privacy/

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they worried about their kids interacting with strangers online. As Hanna Rosin

explained in a cover story for e Atlantic last November about teenage sexting,

adults often respond to such scandals with fearmongering and massive information

campaigns. e National Association of School Psychologists has helped to develop

a curriculum devoted exclusively to raising cyberbullying awareness, while myriad

apps have been developed that allow parents to track their children’s digital

footprints. According to the Pew report, half of the parents surveyed said they had

used parental controls or other means of blocking, �ltering, or monitoring their

teens’ online activities.

And then there are the educators who worry—arguably for good reason—that the

digitalization of classrooms is severely undermining their pedagogy. At the higher-

ed level, some professors have even published manifestos on why they’re banning

laptops from their lecture courses, while many K-12 campuses to this day maintain

no-device policies (though it appears such policies are becoming obsolete).

According to Loewy, this dichotomy amounts to a major missed opportunity. Kids

not only need to be pro�cient in how to use digital technology, becoming savvy

coders and proli�c ebook readers, he explains—they also need to deeply,

holistically, and realistically understand how the digital world works behind the

scenes. And that doesn’t only mean realizing that sexting is a victimizing and

punishable offense with long-term repercussions. Or that social media can be

addictive and full of predators. While it’s undoubtedly important to keep kids safe

when they’re online, these focuses give kids “a distorted view of the digital world,”

Loewy writes. “It is a view that re�ects the fears of adults rather than the aspirations

of youth.”

* * *

Loewy was teaching a summer journalism class for middle-schoolers in Princeton,

New Jersey, when he had his epiphany. “is generation has grown up with a

completely different type of relationship to the media,” he said. “ey have not

seen a newspaper other than their parents reading one. ey don’t even watch

television—everything is Internet-based.” And while such a statement might

conjure images of a curmudgeonly cynic convinced that technology is an assault on

human intellect, Loewy sees that transformation as positive—or, at least, inevitable.

It’s just that today’s kids need much more guidance on how to live within this

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/why-kids-sext/380798/?single_page=true

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/cyberbullying/

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-deconstruction-of-the-k-12-teacher/388631/

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-case-for-banning-laptops-in-the-classroom

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/why-the-end-of-the-school-cellphone-ban-is-a-win-for-poor-students/382601/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/why-kids-sext/380798/?single_page=true

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world, he argues. “ey are consuming and seeing so many things online that they

don’t know how to put it into context or how to evaluate it,” he said.

At the same time, “even schools that have called themselves very technologically

advanced haven’t even begun to explore how they actually teach [about that

technology],” he said. ey may hand out iPads or laptops to students, but such

education often stops at the hardware. “Curriculum is the microcosm of what’s

going on in society; I think that curriculum needs to catch up with the reality.”

Boyd, it’s worth noting, draws similar conclusions:

Teens will not become critical contributors to this [Internet] ecosystem simply

because they were born in an age when these technologies were pervasive.

Neither teens nor adults are monolithic, and there is no magical relation

between skills and age. Whether in school or in informal settings, youth need

opportunities to develop the skills and knowledge to engage with temporary

technology effectively and meaningfully. Becoming literate in a networked age

requires hard work, regardless of age.

After his revelation, Loewy, who spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent

writing for major British and Canadian newspapers, started developing what he’s

now calling “an interdisciplinary curriculum for the digital age,” a.k.a. “Living

Online.” e curriculum, which is designed primarily for high-school students

(though he says it can be adapted for younger kids, too), includes a dozen teaching

modules that would be integrated into various classes—from “Privacy” and “A is for

Algorithm” to “Digital Activism” and “Cyberpsychology.” Other units under

development include “Remix Culture,” “Gaming in Education,” and “Reality—

Virtual/Actual.” In some ways, it could be described as the liberal arts of virtual

living.

e curriculum’s �rst unit—”Identity”—aims to give students insight “into how

their identities may be unconsciously shaped by digital media and online

socialization.” e module highlights opposing perspectives on the topic, from that

entertained by people like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who insists users

should only have one authentic identity, to the view that individuals are

multifaceted and prismatic. “We will examine how individuals craft and express

their identities across multiple online and offline contexts,” the summary says, “and

http://www.livingonlinelab.org/portfolio/

http://www.livingonlinelab.org/

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discuss the implications of having different identities, avatars, and facets of

ourselves across different networks.” e idea is to get past the emphasis that adults

often make on the perils of Internet identity, to show kids that they’re in a process

of discovery and can play with and explore different personas—even if that means

an adolescent boy posing online as a 35-year-old woman. And this, to Loewy, is a

good thing: “It’s a part of experimenting, exploring who you are, and getting the

opportunity to interact with people you normally wouldn’t interact with.”

Meanwhile, in the unit titled “Economy of the Internet,” kids would learn about

the role of advertising in the World Wide Web: how websites generate money by

attracting visitors and then sell those visitors’ personal data. e unit called

“Diversity of ought: Breaking Out of the Bubble” aims to have teens analyze

debates about whether digital technology makes users more open-minded or more

enclosed in their world views, while that on “Digital Disruption” would use case

studies such as Net�ix and Uber to explore how these forces destruct and create.

* * *

e idea behind Living Online is by no means new. e University of Pennsylvania

English professor Kenneth Goldsmith launched a course this school year called

“Wasting Time on the Internet,” which requires students to watch YouTube videos,

tweet, and even plagiarize. Explaining the course’s objective to e Atlantic last

December, Goldsmith said, “it’s [about] understanding that digital existence … You

know, we’ve become so good at using tools, but we’ve rarely stepped back to

consider how and why we’re using those tools.”

Two years ago, one well-known Florida teacher reasoned in a blog post that the

country needs “a coherent plan to teach digital citizenship in schools”—not as an

add-on but as a complement to what’s already being taught in the classroom. Such

citizenship, she said, “is not about the technology itself but rather the effects that

arise from its usage.” And just a few days ago, the Harvard Internet-law professor

Jonathan Zittrain posted a video message on YouTube that coincidentally sounded

a lot like Loewy’s elevator pitch for the unit titled “Wikipedia and Open-Source

Knowledge.” Highlighting the success of the site and lamenting the ineffectiveness

of American public education, Zittrain—who authored the 2008 book e Future

of the Internet and How to Stop It—suggested that schools integrate Wikipedia into

https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/undergraduate/2015/spring/engl111.301

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/wasting-time-on-the-internet-101/383966/

http://blog.edtechteam.com/2014/11/why-schools-need-to-teach-technology.html

http://yupnet.org/zittrain/

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their curricula, asking kids to edit articles and make the case for their edits. He

continued:

To me, if I think of an advanced civics class, it’s great to learn that there are

three branches of government and X vote overrides a veto. But having the civics

of a collective hallucination like Wikipedia also a part of the curriculum, I

think, would be valuable.

But for various reasons, schools have yet to catch on. Data on how much, if at all,

schools in the U.S. are teaching these things doesn’t exist, but it’s worth noting that

even the much more obvious subject—computer science—is still largely considered

a peripheral course. A 2013 survey of 1,250 educators nationwide found that more

than a fourth of them worked on campuses that didn’t even offer computer science.

Meanwhile, national initiatives to modernize schools—through projects such as e

Center for Digital Education’s “Curriculum of the Future”—rarely touch on the

liberal arts of virtual living, focusing strictly on topics like new technologies and

workforce preparation. According to a 2012 report from Common Sense Media

based on survey of nearly 700 K-12 U.S. teachers, more than half of them ranked

their students’ digital-citizenship skills as fair or poor; only a fourth of them said

those skills were taught at their schools.

Adults’ resistance to new trends, too, is surely part of the reason why schools

haven’t addressed these needs. For one, Loewy suggests that many educators don’t

feel digitally literate. A shrinking but still relatively signi�cant percentage of

educators—especially those who are 55 and older—don’t feel con�dent with these

new technologies, according to a 2013 Pew Research survey among roughly 2,500

A.P. and writing teachers. Meanwhile, many teachers simply feel overburdened by

the new technology: ree-fourths of the educators surveyed for the same Pew

report say the Internet and other digital tools “have added major demands to their

lives,” largely by “increasing the range of content and skills about which they must

be knowledgeable.”

Indeed, experienced and accomplished teachers continue to raise questions about

schools’ embrace of digital technology, which could mean that Loewy’s effort is

moot. Nancie Atwell, a veteran language-arts teacher who last month won the

inaugural Global Teacher Prize, is one of many educators across the country who

are deeply concerned about the growing role digital devices are playing in

http://csta.acm.org/Research/sub/Projects/ResearchFiles/CSTASurvey13Results

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/paper/Curriculum-of-the-Future-How-Digital-Content-is-Changing-Education.html

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum

http://www.globalteacherprize.org/winner

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classrooms, primarily because of their arguably negative impact on cognition and

learning. “Although the world may be digital, it also remains human,” she said.

“e emphasis on any device as a panacea—give one to every kid and see what

happens—completely ignores everything we know about what motivates people to

learn.”

“ese are devices—they’re a means to an end,” she continued. “I’m appalled that

we talk about technology as if it’s a discipline or a school subject or a content area.

It’s a way of developing or displaying knowledge. It’s a little bit like worshipping a

pencil.”

Perceptions like these, according to Loewy, are a large reason why rolling out the

curriculum is so tricky. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg problem: Living Online—and the

teacher training that would come with it—could help bring everyone, from the

skeptics to the overzealous techies, on the same page and alleviate some of the

concerns and misconceptions about the technology. But it’s hard to get people on

board if they have preconceived notions, many of which are well-founded, about

those devices and apps to begin with.

And for now, Living Online is little more than an idea—and one, critics might

argue, that’s neither feasible nor credible. After all, Loewy is a Baby Boomer with

very limited experience as a classroom teacher.

But that hasn’t fazed the former journalist, who admitted that he’s been developing

the program using his own money. (Loewy doesn’t want public schools to pay for

the curriculum out of their operating budgets—he hopes private foundations will

foot the bill—but has yet to secure a grant.) Loewy says he’s devoted the bulk of his

time over the last few years to creating this program, which he’s been putting

together with the help of feedback from teachers and professional curriculum

developers via education conferences and the range of support and sharing sites

available online. He’s currently in the process of registering Living Online, which

was launched in 2013, as a nonpro�t, and as of now the organization only has three

board members—none of whom are teachers (and all of whom are men). ey

include Martin Schneiderman, an IT advisor who works with philanthropic

organizations; Peter Lammer, who co-founded the IT-security company Sophos;

and David Loevner, the manager and founder of a global investment �rm. Loewy

http://www.iaa.com/companyinfo.html

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/company/management/peter-lammer.aspx

http://www.hardingloevner.com/about-us.html

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says he hopes to bring on a group of advisors, including teachers, with diverse

backgrounds.

e curriculum faces a range of other logistical obstacles, too, including the

number of existing requirements that schools are already grappling to juggle. Loewy

sees the curriculum as being incorporated into other classes, not as a standalone

supplement but as an ingredient built into larger coursework. Still, public-school

teachers today say they are already overburdened by a slew of expectations—from

the Common Core math and reading standards to additional state and local

stipulations. Educators across the country have long complained about their

inability to teach subjects as essential as social studies. In that sense, it’s hard to

imagine this program becoming a reality outside of the private-school sector; in

fact, Loewy’s only been able to pilot the modules with private-school students.  

And even if teachers could �nd a way to incorporate the curriculum into their

classes, they’d have to �nd a way to keep up with material and technologies that are

constantly changing. “e … problem is that it’s evolving every single day—it’s not

like teaching ancient Rome, it’s not static,” Loewy acknowledged. “is is what I

think holds back the progress: Every single day there is a new app, and teachers

[can] become sort of blinded by” its merits and limitations. But without

understanding the intricacies and dynamics of the Internet, he continued, “you’re

not taking advantage of everything digital technology offers. Without the

knowledge, you’re not able to take advantage of the web and navigate it properly.

You can’t be an informed, responsible, and critical member of society if you don’t

have the education.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write

to letters@theatlantic.com.

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