Teacher to Be

I found this article intriguing. It talks about newspapers and how they need to change to suit the growing needs of the digital natives. It has an interview from Rupert Murdoch. Mr Murdoch quotes from research and states : “attitudes towards newspapers are especially alarming. Only 9 percent describe us as trustworthy, a scant 8 percent find us useful, and only 4 percent of respondents think we’re entertaining” I found this interesting because I get most of my news of the internet and don’t really read the newspaper anymore. I never really thought what others were thinking when it came to newspapers.

I loved this quote “One commentator, Jeff Jarvis, puts it this way: give the people control of media, they will use it. Don’t give people control of media, and you will lose them.”  Why pay for a newspaper when you can look it up on the net. At the same time, it is kind of sad that we are going digital, you lose that era, the ones who sit down and read the newspaper with a coffee.

 The next statement I believe could easily be adapted to suit teachers. “By streamlining our operations and becoming more nimble. By changing the way we write and edit stories. By listening more intently to our readers.” So By listening to our students, Becoming quicker with the technology and changing the way we teach we can meet our digital natives.

He asks the question “What do we – a bunch of digital immigrants — need to do to be relevant to the digital natives?” 

He goes on to talk about what the digital natives want, he writes “The challenge for us is to create an internet presence that is compelling enough for users to make us their home page.” I do not think I have ever actaully activly searched out a newspaper homepaeg, usually I just write in google news today and look it up or msn just has it on their homepage. I find it interesting that newspapers think about their digital natives, I mean it is obvious now, but before I only thought about digital natives in reference to education.

sourced 22/09/2008 from http://farm1.static.flickr.com/125/322112273_1fd19bade5.jpg