Born Digital, written by our principal investigators John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, is officially released! For over a year now, we’ve been interrogating arguments, exploring hypotheses with kids, and thinking about what new digital practices mean in the context of law, education, and business. It is so exciting to see this first major publication of the project go live. Huge congratulations to John and Urs!

In keeping with ethos of the book, Born Digital is available in digitally in Kindle format, to the Shifted Librarian‘s enjoyment.

(from The Shifted Librarian’s flickr photostream)

And of course, available in analogue form as well.

I’m not going to give too much away, but I will share what I take away as one of the major messages of the book: Parents, teachers, policymakers and digital natives need to work together to both take advantage of the potentials of the digital world and address the issues that are raised. How do we do this? First step is to engage in dialogue between those that are at home with digital technologies, and those that are not. Just as parents and teacher who may not be fluent in the online space have much to teach youth, kids who are immersed in digital technologies have much to teach their older counterparts that are less knowledgeable about the digital space. Learn from each other.

In this ethos, the photo below, courtesy of WeAreWhatWeDo
reflects for me an important message of the book. WeAreWhatWeDo aims to inspire people to change the world through everyday actions. In looking to shape the future of life online – to take advantage of the opportunities while addressing the risks in digital space – here’s one action that is a first step in helping us get there.

“Talk to old people. They know cool stuff you don’t.”
“Talk to young people. They know cool stuff you don’t.”

– Miriam Simun

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