LISTENING AND ATTENTION
These are obvious changes, which hide a very important cognitive change: today's generation is less predisposed to listening and confrontation, to the oral examination the children go through a lot of difficulties, they are more likely to write rather than talk to each other, spend hours on social networks, online games, etc.. Moreover, in their ordinary writing, the Internet and SMS have brought abbreviations, but they have also modified the logical structure of the text. However, their ability to orient themselves in digital space is immense compared to ours, they have developed a skill of learning by doing and are very skilled in multitasking, which we should not fear.
The little boy who is studying today is listening to the I-pod and concentrates equally, which is very much studied by neuro-scientists because attention is an important cognitive ability and research tells us that multitasking does not imply a lack of attention, even if it must be taught and moderated. For this reason, there are three options: deny digital at school; transfer all teaching to technology; a more balanced way of integration. The approach must be integrative, that is, we cannot ask children not to do things they do in their daily lives. As for balance - an American psychologist talks about an ecological approach to technology -, the school has an educational mission so it must develop all the children's cognitive activities.
Then there is the problem of emotions: today's children do not see in the teacher an authoritarian-authoritative figure like in the past, nor does the family contribute to it. In the past, teaching was based on oral transmission, the transmission of knowledge was direct. If the child understands that, from the cognitive point of view, the concept of authority lies in the net, I cannot fight angry with him, but I must begin to make it clear that what is found on the Internet can be wrong and that the Internet is not an instrument but an environment, a structure generated by an infinite number of virtual connections, while memory is. If we make our own this awareness, if we understand that the Internet is an environment, the next step is to make it clear that you need to introduce rules, however, research tells us that we do not do this reasoning in the Internet environment.
An example on the concept of authority: while in the past an entire social network, maybe even wrongly, supported an anorexic person telling him that anorexia had to be fought, today in the Internet that same person will find hundreds of thousands of contacts of subjects like him who will argue that the others are wrong: it is tragic, but from the cognitive point of view he is right. What is missing today is the transmission of the value of the relationship. What Facebook calls "friends" are not, they are contacts; what we call knowledge on the internet is not, it is information ... the problem is not facebook but how to use it and the fact that no one educates boys characterized by cognitive styles and learning so different from ours. We do not do it because no one has done it with us, there is no educational model of reference.
IDENTITY AND CRITICAL SENSE
The construction of identity is always in motion, but today we also have a digital one, which should not be opposed to the concrete one. The fact is that digital identity is not only built by us, but also by what others say about us so that others get an idea of us without knowing us. There is also a variation in didactics: the manual is contrasted with the materials we find on the web - the historical archive of a newspaper, for example - which affects the perception of truth. Today we launch without regard to a piece of news that appeared on facebook and this becomes true, no one verifies its validity. This is because there is no critical sense. In reality, the Internet has spread to a great critical sense, with the online publication of millions of documents, and this is a historical paradox. Today's teacher is mainly responsible for encouraging the development of the critical sense, he is interested in developing the skills to get to the content, to orient himself in the amount of information that is found in the network. Another problem is that related to memory: or rather to the capacity for attention, because the first is linked to the second. If my attention is dispersed, my memorization is scarce; to work on this, it is necessary to resort to emotions. To ensure that you do not use your mobile phone in the classroom, just use an example to make it clear that when this happens, the teacher is hurt, like a friend who does not listen to us because he is using the phone at the same time.
A FINAL REFLECTION
The development of a critical sense is not only useful to encourage learning but to help children to orient themselves in the Internet environment and in their lives.