23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Little of value here, October 6, 2010
This review is from: Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn (Paperback)
I haven't written a book review on Amazon in over 8 years, but I am motivated to come out of retirement for this one. Please don't waste your time on this book. It does offer some good gems of info, such as the teacher who couldn't get his students to discuss a book in English class, so he created a Facebook group for the class, and asked them to post their thoughts on the book there. These useful anecdotes are unfortunately hidden in a wash of manure. The book is full of gross generalizations about today's youth and their media and technology habits. You've read these facts in a number of news publications, or you probably know enough from kids you spend time with. We get it. Kids use technology. So does everyone else. Kids use it more. Got it.
The author makes a federal case out of multi-tasking, as if no previous generation has had the TV on and been gabbing on the phone while doing their homework. He actually wastes paper defining what an avatar is, and describing how Wikipedia works. At one point he even states that youth "use all capital letters to denote strong emotions such as I AM ANGRY AT YOU." If you're really that clueless, maybe this is the book for you.
The book also discusses how much kids like shallow bursts of information, and states that "even Sesame Street now has more cuts than ever before." Problem is, the article he cites is from 1980. He doesn't disclose this, but I knew this example was outright false, so I took the time to find the referenced article on Google Scholar. The truth is, Sesame Street has been using longer segments, and making fewer cuts per hour episode since about 2003. In another chapter, he shows video and audio podcasts as examples of technology that are more immersive than books. Really? That's so incredibly subjective to the content. I know he wants to push technology, and I do too, but the medium is largely irrelevant there. Just look at how many kids became immersed in Harry Potter books. You can craft an immersive experience in many ways, with many tools and mediums. A great teacher could craft an immersive experience with no physical resources at all.
Those aren't the only instances in this book where he's just making things up.
You could read much better education and technology information on the internet. Please do.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Lacking in data, analysis, and ideas, October 8, 2010
This review is from: Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn (Paperback)
I hate to write a review without finishing the book, but I set this one down two months ago and still have no desire to pick it up again. Since I received it for free in exchange for a review, I feel obligated to write something now. If I do eventually finish the book, I'll come back and make revisions.
Rewired deals with an interesting and important topic, the role of technology in education. The premise is that members of the "iGeneration", who grew up connected to all sorts of technology, have different learning needs from previous generations and that the educational system needs to make changes to accommodate these needs.
Unfortunately, the book itself is boring and unpersuasive. I think it would have been better as a magazine article, because there's just not enough content here to justify Rosen's claims. He can tell me a million times that the iGeneration uses lots of technology and needs technology in education too, but without any deeper reasoning, I'd really prefer to hear it just once.
One example of the lack of content: Rosen tells us on p. 36 (in the second chapter) that "two-thirds of teens say their cell phone is their most essential technology and half view it as 'key to their social life.' In fact, they place their cell phone as second only to their clothing in representing their social status." All well and good, though I'd prefer to see educational policy developed on the basis of trials and experimental studies rather than opinion polls. The real problem, though, is that Rosen repeats this same statistic less than 20 pages later, with no further analysis to justify revisiting the same old data: "According to a 2008 Harris Interactive national study of more than two thousand teens, 57 percent reported that their cell phone is the key to their social life and nearly half admitted that their social life would end or be much worse without their phone. Strikingly, the survey showed that to teenagers, their cell phone portrays much more about their popularity than jewelery, watches, and shoes." (p.52)
If you don't have enough data to fill out a 226-page book, maybe that book just doesn't need to be written right now. I had a similar problem with Rosen's description of an exercise that he carries out with groups of educators and parents. The exercise consists of a "blank chart with generational values and preferences listed on the left side and the four generations--Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers, Net-Geners, and iGeners--listed at the top". The challenge is to match given preferences with the right generation; he gives an example about communication style: "(1) Face-to-face or telephone; (2) email or cell phone (3) text message, IM, Facebook; or (4) text message, Twitter, Skype, Myspace, Facebook, iPhone." He goes on to say that he has never had a group get more than half of it right, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. The problem, though, is that he doesn't provide an appendix with the complete exercise, so we just have to take his word that the questions were meaningful. When I asked him about this in an author chat, he responded that it was in his previous book and the publishers wouldn't let him distribute it separately. Again, it seems that he just doesn't have enough data to justify the existence of this new book.
Despite the lack of data, Rosen could still have done well by proposing interesting new ideas about how to integrate technology into the classroom. Unfortunately, he's big on generalities and doesn't have much in the way of concrete ideas. This is presented as a virtue: "It is important to note that I am not going to tell teachers how they must teach and which lessons to use in the classroom.... I will, however, highlight educational approaches that tap into this younger generation's remarkable technological strengths and passions so that no matter what technology children adopt, educators and parents will be able to use approaches to learning that make use of those technologies and help children shed their aversion to learning." (p. 17) In practice, this means that he's just telling us repeatedly that we should use technology in education, which isn't much help when it actually comes to designing a curriculum. He even points out that some past attempts to integrate Power Point into the classroom failed because the technology was already stale by the time educators tried to bring it in, emphasizing that we have to stick with what's new and edgy, but it's not clear how exactly to go about doing this. Telling us in general to integrate technology into the classroom, but to make sure to do it well and in a way that students will find interesting, just doesn't seem worth the paper. If there's limited data to back up the general claims and limited concrete suggestions about what to do, I just don't see the point of this book.
When Rosen does try to address practical points, his arguments come off as extremely simplistic. He defends the use of wireless mobile devices in the classroom by saying that they're not too small to use, based on the claim of one high school student who watches videos on his iTouch all the time. Fine. But this supposed "problem" and feeble "solution" merit as much time as the much thornier issue of the socio-economic divide and whether students from lower-income families will be put at an even greater disadvantage than they are now by focusing education around the trendiest new gadgets. We're assured blithely that wireless access will soon be free or cheap everywhere, and left to go on our merry way. I remain unconvinced.
In brief, I remain unconvinced about this whole book. There's not much data, there's not much analysis, and there aren't many new ideas about what we should actually do. I struggled through the first 90 pages, but it really doesn't seem worth my time to read on.
As a final note, Rosen also said in the aforementioned author interview that he doesn't like reading reviews, because they're "either glowingly positive or point by point destructive". I guess this one falls in the latter category, but I still think there's something to be gained by listening to criticism rather than avoiding it. It's too bad that this review is doomed to fall on deaf ears.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but Disconnected from the Classroom, July 27, 2010
This review is from: Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn (Paperback)
In Rewired, Larry Rosen argues that the students entering today are profoundly affected by the technology on which they have been raised. For example, Rosen argues that multi-tasking is something that these students have come to expect, and rather than encouraging them to focus on a task at hand, teachers should embrace their multi-tasking proclivities. He acknowledges, though, that there is a trade-off: students who multi-task complete work more slowly even though they seem to retain the same amount. There are numerous trade-offs in Rosen's view of education. He argues that teachers should embrace rich technological environments--like "Second Life"-- but schools tend to block such technology. The idea that schools should open up their networks to games, social networks, and other technologies is just one way in which Rosen seems to ignore the realities that many teachers face. He is similarly dismissive of concerns that some students may not have equal access to technology by relating an anecdote about a poor child who still managed to update a MySpace page. This book would have more real-world usefulness if it managed to recognize the difficulties and offer solutions that teachers can use to overcome them.
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