ABSTRACT
Schools need to reinvent themselves and dramatically change to meet the needs of learners in a 21st-century global context. Seymour Papert, in dialogue with Paolo Friere in the late 1980s, signaled these needed changes two decades ago in their talks on the future of schools. Almost one decade ago, Darling-Hammond (1998) stated that “today’s schools face enormous challenges . . . [they] are being asked to educate the most diverse student body in our history to higher academic standards than ever before” (p. 6). Schools are increasingly populated with students who are shaped by their relationships with information and communication technologies (ICT) in ways that many current teachers could never imagine. These students are adept at multitasking, sophisticated in their use of electronic technologies, and used to a trialand-error approach to solving problems, contrasting with a more logical, rule-based approach by previous generations (Oblinger, 2003; Oblinger, Martin & Baer, 2004). For anyone under 20 years old, the Internet has always existed, creating a world of digitally aligned communities connected just a “click” away. One journalist comments:
[It is] no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest [. . .]. They are skilled in making sense not only of a body of content, but of contexts that are continually changing.
