What are Character Strengths?
Character strengths are virtues. Character strengths such as love, gratitude, hope, patience, generosity, joy, wisdom, and forgiveness can shape people’s understanding of who they are and their understanding of self.
How can digital technology be used to build character strengths in adolescents? Can adults play a role in encouraging the development of character strengths in adolescents? When and how are character strengths developed? Is there a critical time frame to capitalize on for their development? How can we encourage the development of virtues in youth? The Technology and Character blogs posted here explore these questions.
Bridging the Second Digital Divide: Designing Opportunities for Content Creation
For over two decades, talk of the “digital divide” has regularly permeated discourse around educational technology. The term--which gained popularity in the mid-1990’s--originally referred to disparities between those with consistent access to computer technologies and those without. In an era where mobile devices are nearly ubiquitous, however, the digital divide has taken a radically new form. Although digital inequity still persists, such disparities today lie less in access to technology than in how it is used. As the amount of time that young people spend in front of screens increases, a notable gap has emerged in schools and homes alike between those who use technology as passive consumers versus those as active creators. Such inequities have been described as the second digital divide.
A Changing Landscape
For many young people today, the tools needed for digital content creation are readily available to them via mobile devices and an array of websites and apps. Such strides in access, however, are a relatively new phenomena of the last decade.
Looking back 20 years, access to technology was not so universally available. In the mid-1990’s, a series of prominent governmental publications found that although more American households were connected to the nation’s information infrastructure, certain households gained access to new technologies significantly faster. Two reports by the U.S. Department of Commerce, for instance, found that “minorities, low-income persons, the less educated, and children of single-parent households” were disproportionately “information ‘have-nots’” with alarmingly less access to information resources that included telephones, computers, and the internet. They describe this digital divide as one of America’s “leading economic and civil rights issues.”
In the early 2000’s, The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)--an intergovernmental economic organization of 36 member countries--reported a rise in the digital divide in countries across the world, separating “those who live in a digital and connected world from those who are left behind on the analogous side of the divide.”
This divide, they asserted, had impeded full participation in work and had reduced political efficacy.
Research in the last decade, however, paints a picture where young people are increasingly growing up in environments where technology is readily accessible. In 2012, for instance, an average of 94% of students across OECD countries reported that they had a computer at home. And although a 2015 Common Sense Census reported a 25 percentage-point gap in home computer access between children from lower- and higher-income households, the gap in mobile ownership had “virtually disappeared,” with 96% of lower-income families possessing a mobile device in the home. Similarly, a 2017 Common Sense Census exploring media use by kids ages zero to 8 reported that the percentage of homes with a mobile device grew from 52% in 2011 to 98% in 2017.
The Second Digital Divide
Although gaps in access to technology have virtually disappeared for many young people in the past decade, equal access by no means implies equal opportunity.The OECD has utilized data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment measuring reading, math, and science literacy of students 15 years of age, to track international shifts in how technology is used across the world.
In the analysis of the 2006 PISA results, the OECD concluded that despite increased access to technology, a second form of digital divide emerged between those with “necessary competences and skills to benefit from computer use” and those without. Similar to the divide of the decade prior, such competencies were linked to students’ economic, cultural, and social backgrounds.
Furthermore, this report emphasized that although students increasingly appear technologically ‘savvy,’ this alone does not mean that they have developed the skills and competencies that make them “responsible, critical and creative users of technology.” As children are increasingly exposed to technology at a young age, it is imperative that educators and content creators alike resist conflating digital nativism and the ease in which students navigate technology with the 21st century skills and capacities needed to leverage it as a tool in their favor.
Consuming Vs. Creating
As ownership of mobile technology grows, it has become instinctive for many young people to travel between home and school with personal devices in hand. As such, most young people interact with media regularly throughout the day: at home before and after school, while waiting for the bus, in the hallways, and even in many of their classrooms. Recent research provide a glimpse into screen time among teens and tweens.
Specifically, for the first time, the 2015 Common Sense Census quantified time teens and tweens spent using devices for different functional purposes. Oververall, they found that mobile devices accounted for nearly half of all screen time among teens outside of school, and although devices were used to code, write, or make art and music, time dedicated to content creation paled in comparison to that spent watching videos, listening to music, or playing games. The “passive consumption” of media, according to the report, accounted for 39% of time on devices, while a mere 3% was dedicate to content creation.
Opportunities for Content Creation
With increased access to technology comes new opportunities for students to learn, collaborate and create beyond the confines of the traditional classroom. As such, a number of exemplar applications have emerged that support young people in moving beyond mere passive consumption, and instead empower young people to actively leverage their devices as content creators.
Digital Promise’s 360° Story Lab, for instance, supports young people in producing 360° media to create experiential stories that share youth perspectives. Their global campaign “Join MY World 360°” encourages youth worldwide to create immersive media related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Similarly, a number of new authoring tools provide opportunities for non-technical users to seamlessly create immersive 360° stories, including Google’s Tour Creator and IRL Lab’s SocialVR. The latter provides users a simple drag and drop platform to combine 360° photographs and video with user-generated annotations, such as audio recordings, still images, and text.
Scratch, a programming language developed by the MIT Media Lab supports even the youngest learners in programing their own interactive stories, games, and animations as well as proving a moderated online community to share digital creations with others around the world. Currently, there are over 42 million projects shared to this community.
Based on Karen Brennan and Mitch Resnick’s research of the Scratch platform, the active creation of content using programming has supported young people in developing computational thinking competencies including an ability to view computation as something they can use “for design and self-expression.” “Young people should feel empowered to ask questions about and with technology,” Brennan and Resnick assert. This, they state, leads young people to feel less disconnected between “the technologies that surround them and their abilities to negotiate the realities of a technological world.”
Considerations for developers:
Although most young people have access to technology today, disparities exist between those who use technology to consume versus those who use it to create.
When designing technology, consider integrating opportunities for users to create their own media in addition to interacting with pre-made content. This might take the form of drawing an illustration or recording an animated video.
As not all young people might have experience using technology to create their own content, consider scaffolding opportunities step-by-step for greater support.
Look for inspiration in existing communities of youth-created content, such as the Scratch online community.
Tyler Samstag
Tyler is the Director of the Center for Creativity at the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, a regional service provider for 42 public school districts in Western Pennsylvania. Interested in the intersection of education, technology, and design, Tyler regularly supports schools in the thoughtful integration of new technologies and teaching practices. Tyler holds a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University and graduated from the Mind, Brain, and Education program at Harvard University, where he was an Urban Scholars Fellow. Connect with Tyler via LinkedIn and Twitter.
This blog was originally created to support Baylor University in hosting its Technology Innovation Request for Proposal: Improving Character Strengths of Adolescents through Technology Innovation.
