http://youthandmedia.org

This just in: DN’s own John Palfrey will be giving a “webinar” in the PBS Teachers LIVE! series on February 26 at 8 p.m.! Details from PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 below.

PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 is delighted to have John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, as our guest for “Teaching and Learning with Digital Natives”, the next webinar in the PBS Teachers LIVE! series to be held Feb. 26 at 8 p.m.

In this upcoming webinar, participants will learn about “digital natives”, whom Palfrey describes as a “select” population born after 1980 that processes and sees the world very differently than generations prior. The characteristics of these students demand a new paradigm for engaging learners. The discussion will also focus on how educators can become familiar with the technologies of digital natives and use these technologies to compliment their pedagogy.

How Do I Register?
Simply sign up at http://www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/create-profile/ to become a PBS Teacher and you will receive a webinar invite the week of the event.

(cross-posted from John Palfrey’s blog)

Andy Oram, editor at O’Reilly, has posted something quite extraordinary on the wiki for our book and associated research project. It appears that he has read Born Digital and then posted his review on the wiki for comment before he posts it to the O’Reilly Media web site. I hope others will take up his challenge to comment on it; just the sort of conversation we’re delighted to have, in small measure, provoked. (For the record, this review-in-the-making is an effective critique of the book, which points at several of the inevitable soft-spots in our arguments.) Thanks much, Andy, both for doing the honor of reading and reacting in depth to the book, but also for doing it in this fashion.

(cross posted from John Palfrey’s blog)

After about four years of planning, research, and writing, Born Digital officially came out this week. Urs Gasser and I have so many people to thank; we have been blessed with such great teammates and friends and helpful critics along the way. (Much of the work that the team has done is recorded, and will be updated, on the project’s web site, wiki, and so forth.)

I admit to being very sheepish about what comes next. Several people have sent kind emails that say, basically, “congrats on the book coming out and good luck with the promotion.” Thinking about “promoting” ourselves and our book (wrapped up, now, in our identity, as “authors”) makes me very queasy. I much prefer the idea of our participating in an ongoing public conversation about youth and media, a conversation that is well underway with lots of brilliant people involved. To that end, I’ve been thrilled to see the first three web 2.0-type reactions to the book.

– The Shifted Librarian comments — by photo! — on buying Born Digital for her Kindle. This is so fitting, and cool. (As I commented on her post, I got teased at a book talk at Google the other day that the Kindle edition was initially priced at over $20.00, which was more than the hard-cover cost of $17.00 and change; it’s since come down some.)

– I am grateful to the Librarians! Law Librarian blog has a post, which (justifiably enough, and in a mere few words; very economical) juxtaposes the marketing description of the book against what we actually say inside its covers; and,

– A brand-new friend — who contacted my via Facebook about his blogpost — JohnMac is wondering about where he fits into the scheme. I suggested that he is probably a Digital Settler, which is a fine thing to be, (and thought I’d point out this post, in which I responded to critiques from Henry Jenkins and danah boyd and others about the terminology we work with in the book). I have a feeling we’ll be doing a lot of explaining, and perhaps defending, these choices of terms — but that, it seems, is in fact part of the point!

Thanks to all who have contributed to this discussion already, and looking forward to much more — some of it playing out in the public parts of cyberspace.