• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

A student’s view of informal learning’s value

September 13, 2011 By Anne 4 Comments

“My passion lies where I can be creative and have fun and be around people that can support me,” says Dallas high school student Blake Copeland in a video interview at eSchoolNews.com. And Blake has definitely found people’s support – or the supporters found him. In his spare time, he learned the programming language for iPhones, Objective-C, and developed an iPhone app called DateFinder that fellow students have since used in a history class to look up significant dates in history. That caught the attention of well-known education technology speaker and consultant Alan November, organizer of the BLC (for Building Learning Communities) conference held this summer in Boston.

“The reason I created the iPhone app,” Blake said, “is because I was passionate about computers, I was passionate about creating. So over time just using them wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to create something on my own and I didn’t get support from the school, so I turned to friends and other communities online to help me out with that,” illustrating what many tech educators call the disconnect between learning and school. After participating in the BLC conference in Boston, Blake was asked by the organizers to head up the student staff for the first Southwest BLC. “Being the guy in charge, coordinating everything, getting to hang with all those guys was just a blast,” Blake said. I’m telling you all this to spotlight not only how digital-media-related “informal learning” can launch careers early but also to zoom in on what Blake said about how, as many young digital-media users feel, “just using technology wasn’t enough. I wanted to create something on my own.” He learned the basics of programming logic, wrote an app in the Objective-C programming language, and registered with Apple as a developer. “You’ve got those three things, and you can pretty much go anywhere,” Blake said. That’s the agency and creativity digital technology and media allow young people – broadening horizons and spheres of influence well before they’ve finished high school. It’s wonderful that stories like Blake’s are becoming less extraordinary and more possible – globally – all the time. [All this is explained in the rich detail of multiple such stories in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning in News Media from the researchers of the Digital Youth Project and MIT Press.]

Share Button

Filed Under: education technology, School & Tech Tagged With: Alan November, apps, BLC, Digital Youth Project, education technology, informal learning, Objective-C

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. 12-year-old New Zealander's mixed-media publishing business - NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    March 2, 2014 at 12:03 pm

    […] “A student’s view of informal learning’s value” […]

    Reply
  2. Great contest for teen activist/app developers | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    November 30, 2012 at 12:36 am

    […] code writers like iPhone app developer and high school student Blake Copeland in Texas (see this). The Grand Prize is $2,000 plus five hours of virtual mentorship from an adult programmer, […]

    Reply
  3. About the (social) media revolution | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    November 27, 2011 at 7:32 pm

    […] young people who are leveraging the revolution here, here, and […]

    Reply
  4. So what good is social media? | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    October 28, 2011 at 9:37 pm

    […] “A student’s view of informal learning’s value” […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Connect with me on LinkedIn
Follow me on MASTODON
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • Safety by co-design: How we can take youth online safety to the next level
  • Much-less-social media on Facebook’s 20th birthday
  • What child online safety really needs, senators
  • Welcome to 2024!
  • Supporting the youngest witnesses of this humanitarian crisis
  • Should our kids learn how to use generative AI? Well…
  • The missing piece in US child online safety law
  • Generative AI: July 2023 freeze frame

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for toots on Mastodon or posts on our Facebook page, LinkedIn and Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2025 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.