Cyber-Learning To Make Cyber-Teachers

Cyber-Learning To Make Cyber-Teachers

Cyber-culture is a large group of people the majority of which are young. This is because the internet's prominence is new. Fifteen years ago very few people were on-line at home. Children who have grown up with the Internet are more likely to use it as a tool for learning and communicating; they had the choice of not writing by hand, of always emailing instead of phoning. People who grew up without the Internet did not have that choice; there was a time when they had to write by hand, when they had to use the phone. So there are many children who have always learned and communicated with the Internet; they are the core of cyber-culture, they are the cyber-children.

The cyber-children of today read and write differently. George Landow, in his essay “Twenty Minutes into the future, or How Are We Moving Beyond the Book”, said, “These new digital information technologies involve fundamental changes in the way we read and write, and these radical differences, in turn, derive from a single fact, the physical to the virtual” (219). The fundamental changes that Landow is talking about need to be recognized; they need to be understood by the teachers that cyber-children have. Cyber-children are not going to respond to ways of teaching that were designed before the Internet. And since most of the teachers today finished school and got their degrees and teaching certificates before the Internet’s present prominence, there is a problem. Teachers need to use methods of teaching reading and writing that reciprocate the needs of cyber-children.

There is a problem with the ways in which teachers teach these children who are the core of cyber-culture. Much of the problem stems from how the students learned to read and write as it differs from how the teachers learned. Cyber-children have learned to read on-line, their teachers learned with print. James Sosnoski, in his essay “Hyper-readers and Their Reading Engines”, points out differences between reading printed text and reading what he calls hypertext. He says that readers of hypertext use, “ . . . filtering: a higher degree of selectivity in reading” (402). So cyber-children are geared toward the bigger picture, and they leave out details.