Our challenge as teachers, educators, leaders is to see how the digital landscape can create new ways of expressing and constructing knowledge rather than replicating current ways of communication and expression. I for one am keen to explore these possibilities with our youngest of children, for they are born into it and cannot afford to wait for the generation of the 97’s to qualify as teachers.
My current area of research is upon the creative and expressive uses of digital languages and tools in the early childhood arena of education. For children with whom I am working with now, they are immersed into this digital rich context of social media, coding, research, platforms, and hacks, where books are downloaded and games played online with multiple players in different continents. They will have been digitally scanned in the womb, their birth records entered onto digital platforms and their first images of ‘self’ posted across social media sites by their well meaning parents before they were even born. Their social identity already public, multiple and complex.
Debi Keyte-Hartland 