Digital Youth Portraits and The World's Flatteners

Digital Youth Portraits and The World's Flatteners

In all videos that I watched from “Digital youth portrait” list, the children from different ages and grades have interesting skills and abilities to fascinate  older generation: they enjoy using technology and creating something with it. The thing that really stuck me in these stories is that all these children are computer geniuses, even though one of them (Olyvia) did not have a computer at home. I noticed that most of these children are interested in music and computer games too.

Mostly I am impressed with Dylan who has created his own website and in his thirteens  he helps his teachers and works with them in different projects. Also Nafiza, who creates animation movies about education and is aimed to make her own virtual video project working with people from different countries.

Based on these stories I can assume that I, as a teacher should be really ready to learn many things from my students about technology in future because nowadays younger generation  have much more advanced computer skills and advanced access to virtual life than elder ones.

It is a bit sad for me to say so, but in comparison to America and other technologically Developed countries in Armenia TEFL professionals do not use technology in their EFL classrooms very often. Maybe this is because of lack of technological information that they first need to receive and then to use, in order to teach.

Thomas Friedman was one of those people who discussed the topic of technology and internet access integration in our lives from its beginning till nowadays.  According to Friedman “there was a wall between web that came down and the windows came up” which led our world to become “Flat”.

 i.e. there was a wall between people from different edges of the world and as a result of its collapsing people can  see and collaborate with each other more easily. He discusses about some flatteners that totally changed our lives. One of them and the most fascinating for me was its very beginning (1995s) when the first internet browser was created. At that time people could first “touch” the flattened world. Then, I compare it to nowadays internet, that after many years it developed so much that people can work at airline companies and answer phone calls(working) from their homes,  in more comfortable conditions, because as we all know, we feel more comfortable when we are home and modern technology gives us that opportunity to work and feel comfortable at the same time.

There are some connections that we can find in the three following projects: “Digital Youth Portraits”, Sugata Mitra’s “The Hole in The Wall”, and Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat”.We can see that all these three above mentioned projects connect people from different countries and continents letting them to work and collaborate with each other. Actually the most important part of the our world are children who are integrated in this process that makes us concern about some advantages (E.g. children acquire computer knowledge very quickly and can be aware of some more things than adults do and are able to learn over and over again from the global web). Also it has its disadvantages (sometimes they may lose the face to face interaction and the sense of reality by going deep into the virtual life).