 I want to lean into this idea of redesigning the university for a networked age, and to do it with respect to the learning habits of young people, digital natives, as Orson and I have been talking about it. There is a wonderful track led by Antoine Picot and Jeff Huang later where we'll talk about specific architectures, and I want to tie this session of digital natives specifically to that architectures, which is to say, if we were to rethink what a university ought to be, or what a learning environment broadly ought to be, in a digital plus era. This is part of the argument I will make. It's not purely digital. It's not purely in-logged, but a digital plus era. How would we design it? What would that architecture look like? What would the Polytechnico di Torino, when the Olympics comes, and what would it look like in this environment? If we were to design it from the ground up, knowing that we have these hybrid environments in mind, and that is the ultimate premise. I start often when I think about this particular question in preparing for this lecture. With an image that comes from the Harvard Law School Library, delighted to have some colleagues here from Harvard Law School and our library in particular, I think nobody in the room would guess what this is, perhaps save Mr. Fisher in the front row. This is the personal library of a jurist in American history, an important man, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was both professor at the Harvard Law School and a member of our Supreme Court. This was the learning environment that he created for himself. This is his personal library. To me, when I see this personal library of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., I think of the great thoughts that one would come up with here. You think about the article he wrote, The Path of the Law, which is an important piece in legal scholarship. You think about the great opinions that he wrote, some of which we don't think are so great anymore, but they were important. The environment that he created for himself was this one surrounded by books. One that was contemplative in a sense, but also clearly it had all of the masters around him in a way. For me, the heuristic in a way is how do we create that level of learning environments in a digital plus era? What does it look like to create the learning environment for our students that would lead them to think in the same way that Holmes did? What can we know about these young people that will help us to do that design work? I want to turn next, though, to a problem that relates to the scholarship and to invite you into a little debate. As Urs mentioned, and as previous speakers have led us to see, there's a big conversation going on about whether kids these days are different. One of two polls takes a pure form of this argument. The pure form is to say that young people are fundamentally different from those who came before. They are digital natives. They have grown up in a world where they learn in different ways. They relate to one another in completely different ways, the social. They are constantly connected to these technologies that they in fact relate also to institutions, politics, business, and so forth in fundamentally new ways. This is most notably made as an argument by a guy named Mark Prensky who coined this term digital natives. And that's the strong form of the argument on one side. This argument, though, has been discredited or it's been at least challenged by the dominant academic view. The dominant academic view at the moment of researchers, excuse very far in the other direction, there's in fact a deep skepticism about this theory of digital natives. In fact, researchers to a person, perhaps Urs and I, as the only exceptions to this, really dislike this term, digital natives. Really dislike it because it seems to give a sense of essentialism that because they have grown up in a particular moment that they all act the same way. That this is a faulty way to look at the world. That kids in fact are no different than kids that came before. That kids in fact learn exactly the same way just in a new environment. That this is entirely a constructed phenomenon. And that what we are doing is to make kids into something that they aren't. We are in fact trying to celebrate them in a way that is unhelpful to the schools. And in fact, if we go down the path of saying we need to rethink everything in light of what these young people do and how they learn that we will get it entirely wrong. And they point back to previous changes in technology. For instance, the radio here in the land of Marconi, a wonderful moment to be able to thank you for the Nobel Prize winning gentleman who gave us this great communications breakthrough to television and so forth. We didn't up end the university completely when radio came along or television, right? We didn't go to a pure distance mode. There were discussions of this if you go back and read the literature. And in fact, if we had skewed too far away from the physical experience of education, then we would have made a huge mistake. So in the recent intellectual history of this term, you have these two poles. And when Urs and I took on the job of studying this topic and writing a book, we decided that what we would do is to embrace the term digital natives. We would not resist it. We would embrace it. Why? When we went to the Congress to testify about these topics, about child safety or how kids learn, this was a term that resonated. It resonated for Congresspeople. It resonated for parents and teachers confused about this topic. It was something that had cultural resonance. So we decided the idea would be to reclaim it. And to reclaim it by saying it's not a generation, but instead it's a population of kids. It's a group of kids within the world who use these technologies in a particular way. And it's something that continues to evolve. So the argument that we try to make around digital natives is yes, there is a phenomenon, such as the digital native. But it's not everyone. So how do we define it? We define it by a few characteristics, and then we'll describe some attributes that I think are enduring attributes of this group. So one is to say there's presumably some date involved here. We chose 1980. This is the date at which Bolton Board Systems and other social technologies came on. So we decided that anyone born after 1980 would be possibly in this group. So how many people born after 1980 here? Not me, but about 6, 10, something like that, out of a few hundred. Hi, yes, of course, Marco. You get the next word, importantly. So we chose this date somewhat arbitrarily. The second was to say that these digital natives had to have access to the technology. And here we are in this global environment. Of course, the crucial point being that there is still a digital divide. We know that only about 1.3, maybe closer to 2 billion people have access to this kind of technology in the world, the sort of fast connection on a big PC. And then if you add in the kind that is preferred by lots of kids, the mobile technology, you get another maybe 3 billion people have something like this. But still there are 6.8 billion people on the planet. We know there's a digital divide. So it can't be that everyone born after 1980 is a digital native. And then the final characteristic, and the most important one, the most important one for us as teachers in universities or those designing universities is the notion of having the skills to use them. So there's extensive research that shows that there's a very broad band of sophistication of usage of these technologies. And I think this is an essential fact for us. Our colleagues Esther Hargitay and Henry Jenkins both call this the participation gap. The gap between those may have been born accident of history after a certain date, who have access to the technology, accident of history that they're born in a rich town like Torino. But they don't have the ability to use it very well. They're not supported in this way. They use it in naive ways. They use it not in sophisticated ways. And it runs all the way up to Marco. Marco, who is the truest form of this phenomenon, as we'll learn, someone who has extraordinary skill with these technologies, who can do wonderful things. And I think it's somewhere in between these polls that we ought to come out. Not that all of the young people out there in the world are digital natives. Not that there's a generation, but that there is a phenomenon. And it's something that we can study empirically and learn what the attributes are. I think it's important also to note that it's not just kids who use technology in these extraordinarily sophisticated ways. So Massimo gave us the sense of wonder about Arduino. Clearly he has all of those skills, presumably born before 1980, but no doubt the same set of skills as these kids in many respects, that just as there are digital natives and digital immigrants, that we should think two of the digital settlers. Those who were there at the beginning of the technologies and who in fact have constructed and built them, the leaders like Massimo, who are the digital settlers. Another digital settler, does anyone know whose hands these are? Pause, Obama. It's just to me amazing that you can put up on a screen a slide of a pair of hands anywhere in the world, and everyone knows that that's President Obama's pair of hands, the most famous pair of hands in the world. President Obama, when he ran for election to become President of the United States, there's a story that happened during the campaign. He was standing beside a soccer field as his girls played soccer, and he was on his Blackberry typing something to his campaign manager, and his wife comes along and slaps it out of his hand saying, you can't be photographed doing your Blackberry when you're supposed to be watching soccer. And he's continued to have this crackberry addiction, as many of us do, where's your Blackberry, where is it, you don't lose it, and somehow continues to have this in the White House. So I think it's important to note that even though it was born well before 1980, sometimes have just as much in the way of skills, and of course we are constantly modeling it. I can't resist one more photo of our President. This is a picture that is meant to promote libraries, as you can imagine President Obama during law school in a library environment, if you can see down below it says where all the cool kids hang out. I think this is a good aspiration for us to create libraries and universities, even in a digital age, even Charlie, if the library for the university is cyberspace, I'm not yet convinced, we will come back to this, that we create these environments of this sort. So I want to pause for one second. I was in preparing for this lecture struck by the irony of talking about how young people learn in more interactive and different ways, in some cases of giving a lecture at a conference of this, and seemed too rich, too rich in irony to be the one person standing on the stage talking about it. And that much of what we study is of course peer produced, that we engage this idea that it is not only the one person on the stage who knows something, but it's the group. And of course in this particular project, the person who I've learned most from, we are all freshmen, I'm still a freshman plainly, Juan Carlos, is Urs Gasser. And I wonder, Urs, if you would join me up here, I'm going to bring you into the lecture to make it somewhat more interactive, and I'm going to pose to you some secret questions. No, up, up, up. You have to come up, and you need a mic. And Marco, you're next after this one. All right, Urs, here you go. This gives me the opportunity to tell you that you should slow down a little bit. For the translation, thank you, I will do. That's very good. So you can start modeling, for me, the slower means of talking. Excellent, in your European way. So the first question I have is, we made this conscious choice, a conscious choice, to talk about digital natives as the topic. We've gotten a lot of abuse, having written a book, Born Digital, where we used this term, that we were on that first poll, the poll of saying it's essentially something that is fundamentally different from what came before. But of course, we try to reclaim the term and to do something different. So a few years after doing it, did we get it wrong? In some respects, do you regret this decision of embracing the term digital natives now that we've seen, in fact, not just the pushback to an argument, but also the development of cyberspace since? It's a hard question. I do not regret it. I think there is certainly a perception issue that we could have addressed in other ways than we did. And that is, I think, the book that we wrote focused on change. So I mean, the main interest was exactly what is different about digital natives, or this population, actually, that is so deeply immersed in digital technologies. And I think always when you focus on change, that you basically, of course, not make the same strong argument for the things that remain consistent and constant over time. So I can see why we get pushback on that side, arguing, well, you suggest everything is different, but actually it is not. What we have never said, everything is different. But a second issue that I'm more concerned about is, well, there is research out there, too, right, that is solid and that we have reviewed and hopefully also contributed to that actually shows there are differences in information seeking behavior, in information processing, some of the things I mentioned. And even more strikingly, in the recent past, we have a number of neuroscientists and neurobiologists actually arguing that even like the brain structure, the way we are hardwired, in other words, will change through extensive use of online media. So I'm not convinced in a way that our argument isn't sound one, especially if it's seen as a starting point of a conversation, also kind of in the public fora that you mentioned, be it in Congress, be it here, talking about the future of universities and therefore I still believe it's helpful, although, of course, we will learn more over time and have more granular sense of the differences, what is really new, what is kind of the remains there. Very helpful, thank you. I have more for you in a minute, so don't go too far, don't go too far. Yeah, yeah, see, it's good. So I will take this cue, trying to be slower, sorry, to the wonderful translators in back, to talk about in fact the findings of the research, the research that we have done as people studying this, but also building on the shoulders of giants, those who have studied this before. I'll talk about a few of the attributes that make us think that it's worth talking about a population. So the first of them we actually get to through the notion of identity, but I think it's a deeper and more fundamental point for universities about convergence of environments. So one of the questions that we would ask kids was the way in which they projected themselves in the world, how did they create their identity? And what we had in mind, of course, was that they would describe to us the way in which they chose certain clothes to wear. Marco chooses certain clothes to wear today, sneakers and a nice white shirt. This conveys something about who he is. You might imagine the young woman going to a ball and putting on a more fancy dress and so forth, constructing a physical identity. And at the same time they would describe to us the creation of an identity in Facebook, a creation of an identity in the social environments online that they inhabit and through the texting and so forth that they make. And it turns out that this was not a possible question for them to answer. So yes, of course they did all these things. They chose the certain clothes they wore each day and they chose what picture to upload to Facebook, what is their profile picture and so forth. But what was confounding to them was that it was a converged environment. It was just a mesh. It wasn't online life and offline life. It was just life. And so if when we think about building a library, we think about it as a physical space on the one hand and then a virtual space separately. We create the library website. We're making a mistake. We're making a mistake about the convergence of these two environments. The learning environment is not separately the physical and the virtual. It's the same. So Juan Carlos back to your conference design, the notion that there's a Twitter conversation going on right now as well as this conversation going on right now I think is an essential point that we learn from these digital natives. I think deeply related to this when we talk about identities, they describe also how the creation of identities is not just in text. It's not just in what they write, but it's in the characters that they create. It's in the avatars and so forth that they go around through this digital aspect of their converged lifestyle with. This is an example from Second Life. It's more extreme in Second Life, but the lowest common denominator in the research is in fact gaming. So we talked about that participation gap where the richest kids have the most sophisticated skills, the least rich kids tend to have the least sophisticated skills, but it turns out that gaming is a flattener. Everybody, depending on, doesn't matter their socioeconomic status, race, class, gender and so forth, everybody is involved in gaming. This is a remarkable fact that we will track through the session later and much of what happens in gaming is this identity play that young people come home at the end of a day, throw off the backpack and then immerse themselves in this second environment of gaming, which is much about creating and maintaining identity. Second factor that establishes the notion of this population of digital natives is the idea of not doing just one thing at a time but doing multiple things at once. As we've said, there are opportunities and there are challenges, of course, to this. Charlie Nessen this morning mentioned the problem of the laptop in the classroom and I think it's most fundamentally described by this notion of doing more than one thing at a time. So if this were a classroom at the Harvard Law School, this would not be the experience of the teacher by and large. Most of you are in fact looking at me. It's actually sort of awkward that you're looking at me because students are usually looking into their laptops. They're usually looking down doing something else that there is another conversation happening at the same time, this notion of multitasking. You see it also in the dinner table where you have a conversation going on and the kid is trying to text under the table and so forth. You see it with those earbuds as they walk across the street and they're nearly getting hit at all times. They have multiple things going at once. And Urs mentioned earlier this idea of 15 to 20,000 hours mediated by these technologies. One other study in the United States by the Kaiser Family Foundation argued that kids spend as much as 50 hours a week mediated by these technologies. More than a full-time job, according to the newspapers. But partly what explains this is that they're doing more than one thing at a time. They might be watching television while also listening to music, while also doing their homework, while also chatting to somebody else. It's not good or bad, I just describe it as a fact. And a fact that we have to decide whether we want to embrace as universities, do we bring the laptop in the classroom and make the most of it? Do we resist it or do we do something in between? But I think this is a second essential fact of digital natives. Third essential fact is the way in which they relate to media. That they presume that the media will be in a format that is digital in the first instance rather than an analog form. And I think this presents also opportunities and challenges. So in one case, you think about images. As an example, I have a four-year-old daughter. She's named Emmeline. And we went on vacation recently. And on vacation, we forgot our camera, the regular digital camera. So we bought a disposable one, just a regular camera. And she took those pictures of kids. The kids take like people's feet and back sides and so forth, bad pictures. And she would flip them over and say, Daddy, where are the pictures? She was assuming she could go and delete the pictures that were on the back of the phone because, or the back of the camera, she'd never had the experience that you take a roll of film, you bring it to a store, you then get it, wait three days and get it brought back. She didn't have the experience of the analog image. Her presumption was that it was in a digital form. You could then do something with it. You could make something with it, make it more social, and so forth. If you think about music, it's the same story in a way. It's not a surprise that most record stores have no longer offer things that iTunes has become the biggest retailer. Of course, the presumption is that audio is in a malleable form. It's in an MP3 form that YouTube has become the number two search engine in the world for video and so forth. Even print is going in the same direction in some respects, but not at all. And this is an important fact, I think, to put on the table. So newspapers, at least in the United States, are feeling the challenge. They're feeling the challenge of not as many readers among young people, and it's true. I will be interested in whether Marco is a newspaper reader. Maybe because you have La Stampa, you have a wonderful newspaper that everybody reads it still. But with our young people, they're not reading the New York Times in the morning in the same format. They get it online and in digital format. Even journal articles, they get in an online form. But the one anomaly, and I think it's useful to note the one anomaly, is the book. That if you ask our students at Harvard or students in broader surveys, if you have a long form argument, a book like this, how do you want to enjoy it? And they still say I want the book, the hard copy book. I want to open it and touch it and put it in my bag and so forth. And when you look at the sales of the Kindle or the Nook or the iPad, the readers, they haven't spiked among kids. It's not kids rushing out to get these devices. And when you ask them, why do you like the book in this format? They say the same thing as adults. They say the bed, the bath, and the beach. I like to use it in these ways that are comfortable and that I love it as a format. This is the one very important anomaly in the story of digital media and youth. And as we'll explore, of course, this is not only that they come in this format, but that you can do something with them. You, in fact, can use them in these social ways. You can upload them. The example of Wikipedia that Charlie created, I think, is the best one. That knowledge is social and is something that you can, in fact, edit back and forth. And the last attribute to hit here is this notion that Massimo mentioned about creativity in young people and Ursir Andek for a comment in a moment, just giving you, teeing you up. One example of this, academics love the idea that we've gone from a culture of kids who are consumers of information to some who are creators. And we found in our research that it is sometimes true but not always true. That there's still a large segment of the population that we've seen whose creativity online is very, very limited. It's limited to creating a Facebook page or another social network page. The kinds of kids who are doing the most creative things, Massimo's creators, are still a small percentage of the kids, the most sophisticated and so forth, the smartest. We decided to try to tap into these as we did our research. We needed a logo for the digital native project. And so we decided to do a contest. We put a note up on the internet and said, please, give us a logo for our contest. I think we offered no more than the glory of doing it. But we got 176 entries from kids. The winning entry, in fact, was this one from a boy named Brandon Cody. We didn't know Brandon Cody. He's from England. Brandon Cody was gonna win no matter what. He gave us 32 entries. The good part is he gave us a pretty good one. But the essential premise was that in an internet era, we had the ability to put a little signal up in cyberspace and to have a whole bunch of kids come back and give you something very creative and effective, perhaps for no more than the glory of doing it, struck us as something distinctive. So worse, I'm coming back to you if that's okay. Against the backdrop of these attributes, one of the most important one, of course, is is it in fact the case that our digital natives are more creative than kids who came before? So this is one of the push backs on the argument about essentialism and digital natives that, in fact, it's not the case. Kids are just as creative as they were before, no more, no less. And in this environment, we are making a mistake if we pretend that they can do something that they couldn't do before. How do you see this issue of creativity? Is it something to build from, or is it something that is overstated? All these are questions. Yeah, that's why I have nothing else to say on them, so I give it to you. Thank you for that. Well, first of all, I think one of the points we need to make is the distinction between creativity and originality, so one of the arguments we often hear is that much of the content that this produce take a Facebook or MySpace update that is content that counts as user-created content is not particularly creative or innovative. So I think that's the first distinction to make. Now I would say, fair enough, kids have always been creative. My kids are drawing, they like to draw a lot, and they also use the computer and also do creative stuff on the computer. So I would argue, however, that the potential that we have in terms of what is possible for creativity has changed quite a bit through digital technologies. Looking at some of the videos, for instance, we are on a video contest in association with our book, some of the things we've seen there is just really amazing, both in terms of quality of work but also in terms of participation and so forth. So I would be very optimistic, and I think the real question before us is not so much, is it the current state of play? Are kids more creative or is it more or less the same as in previous years? It's the question, how can we draft policies to open up and encourage youth to be creative, also in traditional institutions, such as universities? And I know that you are in the process of creating a lab. For instance, at the library, we, of course, at the Birken Center have also a lab and thinking about youth involvement in that in a very traditional formal setting, of course, and I think that's the way to go. So to draft policies and create spaces and places that encourage creative expression. Excellent, thank you, it's very good. It's very good, better than I would have done. I would add one more piece to the creativity, and then Marco, I have a question for you, if that's okay. One other piece to the creativity is it's not just about creating the content in the form of videos, not just content in the form of educational materials and so forth, but it's also the code itself. This was a crucial point, I think, of Masimo's a moment ago, that the ability to tinker with the code, to create, in fact, the technologies with which people learn is an essential piece of this story. That if you think about the Web 2.0, the social network technologies, many of them were created by kids. They were created by Chad Hurley as an undergraduate creating YouTube. It was Sean Fanning making the disruptive Napster. It was Mark Zuckerberg creating the disruptive Facebook and so forth. Kids are creating these technologies with which they are learning and creating something that is frankly different as a potential learning environment. So, yes, sir. Yes, of course, and then Marco, you're next. So now I have more time to think about your question, and here is one, I think, aspect in addition to what you just mentioned. It's also that, of course, much of the content that is created is created in a peer situation, right? Quite often you would have friends reading, reviewing, clicking on the things you created, be it even on the Facebook status update. And I think there are important skills as research indicates, associated with that type of creativity. So it's not only to be creative in the first place and produce something new, but it's actually learning also quite a bit in terms of social skills, in terms of information literacy and media literacy, and this may actually be something new as opposed to an under my daughter sitting at the table drawing a nice house, right? Because it's deeply embedded in a social context, so that's just kind of it. That's excellent, thank you. And speaking of embedded in a social context, we have Marco, the founder, in fact, of something called the Oil Project. I hope that you will tell us some about it. There's a microphone there. I wanted to pause at this point, which is partway through. Digital native. Yeah, you are, all right. He embraces the term. This is a digital native. They are real, you can touch them. Here comes the spotlight. So in the spirit of peer review and criticism, we've described a series of attributes, and one of the more difficult things is to describe the series of attributes about the subject of your research, in fact, the object, the people who are doing it. So one question would be, does this sound right? These descriptors of youth, of what you're one, have we gotten it right, or would you critique, in fact, how we describe the attributes of digital natives? And from there, are there things that we as universities ought to be doing that we're not? Are we getting wrong, in fact, how we interpret these data that we've been collecting? Thank you. What I care most is to highlight that being digital native doesn't mean just being good at using technologies. And indeed, I appreciated very much the second part of the speech when we talked about digital identity and multi-tasking stuff and the peer-producing things. For example, in Italy now, we heard about digital natives. When we talk about kids of two months who managed to use iPads without using instructions, but there is nothing special at all in that, because just, I mean, kids can quickly learn, can quickly learn, and that's not a news. I mean, Egyptian kids maybe were good at climbing pyramids without reading instructions. So the social aspects are the one we should care most. And in my experience, I'm talking about this little school, online school we have built. Yes, the news, it's quite new but you can learn by the computer, staying at home. But the greatest thing is that you can do that with the peer system we were talking about before. And that means that the student of a lesson is also the teacher of the other. And that's not about technology. That's about the way we really perceive instructions and learning. And from these points of view, I think that a digital native is someone who has a strange relation with authorities, information authorities. First, you talked about newspapers and yes, we are reading that digital natives are not reading so much newspapers and so on. That's why a digital native is a person who won't say, will never say, that's true because BBC News said that, that's a sentence that we will never hear by a digital native because we are born and we are growing up with a so complex system of information and authorities but that doesn't mean anything BBC News or something else. And that's not just, that's not a good aspect. Totally, I mean, we have really lots of bad aspects about that. For example, we have in Italy lots of guys on Facebook who are protesting with laws that are already being rejected. I read yesterday on a friend of mine on Facebook, oh my God, that law is so dangerous but there is no, what do I mean? The problem is that you have from the information overload stuff which is produced from the peer production, you have all the problem about fact checking and things like that. So we really have to work a lot about these aspects but focusing on the social aspects like this is the first step. So in a few words, lots of sources with a strange perception of authorities, different kind of sources, images, videos, what we have already said basically. And the fourth one is a different perception of time. You know, instead of reading a book for an hour, you have these animals, these digital natives who are reading lots of pages of different web pages, books, magazines, maybe we are not understanding anything but that's not definitely wrong. Also about that we have to, you who are scholars, you should doing really resources, lots of resources, sorry for my English, because it's not true that if you spend lots of time reading different things instead of the novel from the 18th century that's worse. I don't know, we have to. Extremely helpful, extremely helpful, thank you. I would echo I think this key point that you make about a different relationship to authority and hierarchy. This of course echoes our wonderful first keynote, a colleague from Rome who made the argument that universities may be at risk, right, in this environment in which hierarchies are being broken down in different ways. So the hierarchies may look like institutions in business, the record industry, the newspaper industry, the telecommunications industry, but it may also be the industry that we're in as universities and that we should bear in mind of course that these same things we study in other industries may come back to us. And you mentioned of course what some of those threats are, it's important to note these are not all wonderful things that are happening relative to the practices of digital natives. One that we worry about particularly in schools is the credibility of information, the idea that you could get information from all of these different sources, and in fact are there other things going on, hidden influences in those materials where it's not the one authoritative source but it's many potential sources. Another one that we hear about consistently is the environment in which you live being one in which there's an overload of information. That if one tried to experience this conference in all of its manifestations, you tried to be here but also be online to listen to the Twitter stream, to listen to the Italian as well as the English that you might get overloaded. This is another of those challenges I think that we face in university. And then last, there are many others, but our challenge is associated with intellectual property. The notion that in some cases the rules are extremely complex as to how kids can use these materials that they wish to use in the learning environment or that we as libraries for instance wish to put online in Charlie's library in the sky if we're trying to make all of our libraries be one in a digital sense, we're restricted greatly by rules and intellectual property and many of the things that we wish for kids to be able to do are very complicated and in fact they then don't do them so we face a bunch of issues. I wanna end my part by turning back to the university and saying how should we respond to this challenge? This challenge associated with how young people are learning and I'm positing that at least some young people are learning differently in these important ways. And it's against the backdrop of course of an environment in which we have less money as universities than we had a few years ago. It's always the case that if what we could do is to build the cyber environment, have a cyber strategy in Charlie's Nessan's terms to put on top of existing universities it wouldn't be so hard. I think the harder question is given that we have to do it with less money how do we turn? How do we prioritize and focus on it? And I would urge us as we go through this track to come back to the essential functions of university and to say what are those things that we need to accomplish and how in a way can the cyber strategy help us do it better? How can we lean into the opportunities associated with these technologies and mitigate those drawbacks? Those are teaching and scholarship and learning of course but I add Juan Carlos's important addition of civic activism and citizenship. Two things I think that are associated often with how young people use these technologies. We need to do it in an environment of course in which there's greater connectivity globally. The notion that there's so much more to learn in this global form of cyberspace in our field of law to understand the extraordinary exploding Chinese legal system which has gone from two law schools 30 years ago to 600 law schools today. If we as a law school based in Italy or in the United States forget the fact that there's this connectivity to an extraordinary exploding story in China and elsewhere we're missing an opportunity. We're missing I think also an important issue if we forget some of these challenges I noted before. If we don't focus on the extent to which too much information, TMI in the US term may drive our students crazy. That there are experiences in which we may need to reintroduce contemplative spaces in the sense of parenting. I'm often struck by the need to tell my kids to turn off the computer and kick them outside so they play soccer or football. They do something other than be online. And I think in universities we have to think about spaces also in terms of reintroducing the kinds of long form thinking and contemplation that have been important previously. And I wanna end by recalling the idea of design and the importance of designing for this digital age. I think right now what we've done to steal an Escher image is to create a very, very complex environment for kids. A complex environment because I think we haven't yet figured out the notion that these two environments are combined, the physical and the virtual. We haven't yet done what I think is the essential hard work in which I hope we can get done some of in this conference. So Juan Carlos, I recall your question to Charlie of how will we know of Communia being a success in this way? How will we know if we have made some progress? And I would put to us the job of the architect that if we were to build a new building, this is the Harvard Law School Library and classroom building called Langdell. If we were to build a new one here in Turin, New Polytechnico, we probably would begin by consulting an architect and putting in the room people who understand the emphasis of what we're trying to accomplish, the way in which we are trying to teach and for whom we are trying to teach, perhaps a design charrette environment in which you bring these people together. I would argue that we haven't done the same thing in this digital plus era. We haven't done the design work of trying to think about what does a university or a classroom or a library or a dorm, the constituent parts, what does it look like if it's a hybrid learning environment, a learning environment in the sense that sometimes in a library, someone walks in to request a book and you get it off the shelf and you go read it within the classical confines of a beautiful room, but at least half of the time, the student comes in your virtual front door. At least half of the time, the student comes to your website to find the information and actually most of the time, they don't come to you first. Most of the time, we know from our data they go to Google first and they look for something there and they go to Wikipedia, they go to Amazon and elsewhere. If they come back to your website, you're lucky. That's the environment in which they're learning and I think that hybrid environment is what we have to design for. And I think the same goes for the classroom. This goes back to earlier comments as well. Much of the time, kids come into our learning environment and we're able to use the Socratic method to teach them or give them a lecture or have a seminar in which we're learning together, but so much of learning is also happening in these cyber environments, whether it's the conversation or the coding that's going on between classes in this cyber world or frankly, more likely, going to sources outside the university to do the kinds of informal learning. How do we design for the extent to which that is so much of what the kind of learning we're doing? And I would argue that it's essential for those of us who are teachers and those of us who are designers of universities that we do this work right now, that we actually begin the job of architecting for this hybrid university in a digital plus era, which does embrace some of the wonderful things that we know digital natives can do, that in fact mitigates some of the problems we know they have, perhaps around multitasking or around getting overloaded with information, but which heads us in the right direction as universities and takes advantage of what we know historically that we're great at. So for my part, I would like to end there and say thank you for this chance to make a case at the beginning of the digital natives track. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Sean. But I invite response from you both and to the floor, I hope. Perhaps we stay just here for 15 minutes. So I was wondering, Marco, since you are also designing a university, you are actually the youngest rector worldwide of a university with thousands of contributors already. I was wondering, no, no, I'm serious. If you could describe your project in broad strokes and then also comment on some of the questions that John's keynote actually raised, viewed from your particular perspective. Thank you. Regarding the website where the digital native would return instead of going always to Google Wikipedia, I think that the only website I would come back doesn't exist and is Artificial Intelligence Driven Fast Checker, but it's sci-fi at the moment. And we have to work on it. Regarding the TMI, too much information theme, a very little story about that and digital native. And I'm talking about a friend of mine who was writing a review about Alice in Wonderland. And you know, you have lots of reviews about Alice in Wonderland on the net. And he found one, he copied it, I think. And the last sentence was finally, Alice in Wonderland is one of a great masterwork of Italian literature. What's the core meaning of that? The core meaning is not that Luke, this is a digital native and he used to copy reviews by the net, that's not the point, I think. The point is the information overload. We have to fight with Artificial Intelligence, semantic stuff, algorithms. The thing, another thing is what we were talking about before, the different perception of time, because that friend of mine, I think, hasn't thought a lot about that last sentence. And also about this, we are talking about digital natives but we are also talking about global natives. And globalization is something who brings you to read Carol and you know, you haven't lied to switch up and said, I think it's not Italian at all. So it's all this stuff together. And if we, for example, managed to resolve the information overload thing stuff, we have also resolved a part of all the system of critics we every day read about digital natives. So that's all. Very helpful, thank you, thank you. Of course. So John, this mode, this theme of globalization, you've mentioned it, you re-emphasized it. How would you see the challenge or possible response by universities to address this new reality, especially, of course part of our research also shows that digital natives are increasingly connected across national boundaries. So what are our kind of creative ways forward to make the universities more global in this digital network environment? So as you know, this is a topic close to our collective hearts. This was a project in studying young people which we did across the Atlantic. So Wurst of the Time was in Switzerland, had a team of people, some of whom are here, Sandra Cortesi on Gerlach, and we had a team of people in the United States at the Berkman Center doing this work. And in creating the study on youth and technology, digital natives, we did it in cyberspace, right? So we used Basecamp as the environment. It could have been any other shared space. And the research teams took the information and put it into a single place in cyberspace. And it was from there that we crafted a book, right? You then make one chapter and edit another chapter and so forth as we go forward. And I think this idea of being able to combine ways in which young people can learn from all different environments from a global network is an essential point. Second, I would say that one of the arguments we tried to make in Born Digital was an argument that it is a global culture. It's a culture of young people who are joined by a common set of practices, a common set of experiences in being mediated by global technologies. And that this may well be one of the commonalities that may help cross cultural understanding. So we did our research in the northeast of the United States. We did research in Bahrain in the Gulf. We did research, of course, in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe. And we did it in East Asia in Shanghai and Beijing. It's too small a study to make a large claim about these commonalities. But what we found, of course, was among elite kids in these environments that they use technologies in very similar ways. So the possibilities for connectivity on a global level are enormous. And I think the right way to think about it from a university perspective, then, is to see it as the next generation exchange program in a way. So we used to have the concept that a student in her second year at the Polytechnico di Torino would come to the Berkman Center and spend some time and so forth. And this is very important. We do have to get on airplanes. We do have to break bread together and have a nice Italian meal with Juan Carlos to understand the environment before we teach together. But I think it's equally important that we think about the possibilities of what we do in between these meetings and how we learn in this broader environment. And I think the study of cyberspace, the study of internet and society, gives us great opportunity to do this. We are networked organizations as learning institutions by our very existence. We are that at our core. And I think if we can make a network, a learning network globally, that involves the study of this one topic, that we can make a case for how universities might tap into this next generation exchange program. Wonderful, thank you. At this point, I would like to open it up for questions and brief comments from the audience. We have about 10 minutes, just as a heads up. Someone came up and urged me to, yes, please, please tell us your name. I'm Oreste Caliano, I teach computer law and internet law in the University of Torino. And thinking to my student in the last 20 years, there was a big change. The first step was the B students, the book students. They studied with a methodology that is deductive methodology, Aristotelic methodology. Probably not the one that used the Socratic method, but here in Europe, in Italy, they used, and the second student is the East student, the student that used the computer, such as my second son, that is very proud to be student of the Polytechnic of Torino and engineer, and as a young boy played with electronic games using try and learn inductive method that gave a lot of problem to us, for example, for the lawyer to use the case method to introduce the learning by doing, the interdisciplinary method and so on. The third kind of student now are the C student, connect student, means the student that uses social network, learn by interacting, use probably the abductive method using metaphorical method because they speak with colleagues in Africa, in Australia, all over the world. So this is difficult for me and for us to find useful and correct global metaphor, global example, global case, global discourse and probably is useful a transdisciplinary method. John said us correctly that it's necessary to have actors, low actors discussing with informatic colleagues. I say also with telematic colleagues, but also cognitive science, also economics, sociological, anthropological science. And my problem is now what will be the future of the organization of the science and of the knowledge, for example, for the son of my son that is a native African and at the age of four use three language and a half and probably you will use the computer as a pen and probably is necessary to organize knowledge because as you know, the organization of knowledge needs 15, 20, 25 years and this is exactly what you put at our attention. Thank you very much. Thank you for this great comment. Would you like to respond, John? No, amen. Any other comments or thoughts or questions? Yes, do we have someone with microphones please? The middle of the room. Hello, I want to ask Marco just a question. If in your opinion there are some typical characteristics, not characteristic values that the digital natives have and they want to share with the world and if yes, if you share, I have a fear that my fear is that in the future these values that the digital natives are taking out will give the place to the ancient values, the non-digital age values. So I have this fear that at the end in the years the digital natives are not so much strong to give voice to their values. Thank you. Yes, we have lots of catastrophistic theories about battles in Italy. We have La fine della modernità di Eugenio Scalfari about these digital natives who are doing what you said about values. I think that the third aspect I said before, which is the one about the authorities' perception is a great positive value and if we manage to resolve the problem of information overload and on the other two aspects, yes, I also have a few doubts, especially on the aspects about the time, the distraction and the different kind of attention we digital natives does have. On the second one, the one about the different kind of contents we use, I think that yes, we can talk about is a video content, a good content, is globally a value to use that kind of content? How much value does an hour on Facebook have? But it's quite complex. But on the first point, the authorities, I think that is a good value. And first, you asked in the future will the university be the center of instruction because we don't have the answer, actually. And regarding that, I have a really banal answer. I don't know if you like banal answers. I do at the end. And I think that we are talking about a globalized marketplace of knowledge. It's a marketplace because it's just one, it's worldwide, et cetera. And in a marketplace of knowledge, does win the quality, the quality stuff. And so if the real answer, the real question is will university manage to guarantee that great quality that will, and the consequences that university will remain the center of knowledge and distraction, that's the core point. And what we really must avoid is, for example, to have great university in the States with university in the States who manage to remain the center of knowledge and in Italy, the opposite. I don't believe this is a real problem. You have these great universities here, of course. But if I might just... I know we're short on time, but I think it's great to have Marco have the last word. But if I can play a video that would answer this question by way of closing, I don't know if you want to say something before I put on the video, but... Please go on. That's okay. So if I might end by answering this question about the content and the way in which young people express themselves. Of course, you have the best example here in Marco and his articulateness and no bad answers. But one of the things that Urs and I have been trying with respect to this book, Born Digital, was to express the book in different formats and in fact to have young people tell the story of the book itself. So we created a blog and young people write blog entries that express the argument of the book. We have the book in a wiki and you can go and edit the arguments. But the most exciting form of the book in a way is in video format and we've had a group of interns at the Berkman Center who have each taken a chapter of the book and taken the argument of it and transformed it in three to five minutes in a video. So if I might, I would love to end with the argument for the dossier's chapter of our book. You no longer have to read the dossier's chapter once you've watched this video. It's by a young woman named Canu Tiwari. She was an intern previously at the Berkman Center. She in fact Egyptian to Marco's earlier point to her. She's 17 years old at the time and had no discernible technical skills. But I think she made a much better argument and I'd love to end with it about digital dossiers than Urs and I did, sorry Urs, in our book. Just about all of us have a digital dossier but many of us have no idea what it even is. Your dossier is the accumulation of all the digital tracks you leave behind and this accumulation did not just start last week, month or even year. It started before you were even born. The line between your digital dossier and your identity is constantly shifting. One way to see the implication of this movement is to imagine how information goes into the file of a child born today. Let's call him Andy. The first entry into Andy's file occurs while he's still five months into the womb. It is a sonogram, probably framed by his parents or even forwarded via email to their closest relatives. The same picture will also be copied in Andy's hospital folder and into a file for the pediatrician who will take over after his birth. As the new baby grows, so do the number of items in his digital file. Andy's bar-coded bracelet lists facts like gender, time of birth, surname and more. Friends and family will come to meet the baby, bring gifts and take more photos, probably with phones or digital cameras. These photos are then also uploaded to other Flickrfeeds or Facebook albums as part of the welcoming process. Andy's parents will use their phones to spread the news with SMS text messages, saying something along the lines of healthy baby boy born six pounds at 5.30 p.m. Friends will also post to the Flickrfeeds which will conveniently contain multitudes of Andy's pictures. This process of capturing and spreading pictures will continue for Andy's entire life with pictures of the first time Andy sits, stands, walks and talks. As Andy grows, he will now be able to independently share information about himself, who registers as a user on Neopets where he fills out his name, age, birthday and other details. Half of the blanks may not be even necessary to fill out but Andy does not notice the significance of the asterisks as described at the bottom of the page. And so Andy grows bigger, taller and broader and with him grows his digital dossier. As an adolescent he is sucked into Facebook where he posts pictures, videos and information about his likes and dislikes. Facebook in turn deposits cookies into his web browser tracking his activities. He signs up for a Gmail account and regularly uses Google to research for information needed in school assignments. Google in turn keeps tabs on all the searches Andy makes from his IP address. In college he buys books from Amazon which asks for his mailing address and credit card number. Andy's credit card company adds even more details to his dossier. The date, time, location and price of every purchase he makes. And as Andy moves around the GPS in his cell phone enables the service provider to know where he is and how many times he has been there recently. He is also filmed by surveillance cameras whenever he walks into secured college buildings. When Andy gets married his dossier expands to encompass all the information about his wife and they start a web blog together to share their thoughts and opinions online. Together they compile shell upon shell of digital tracks, files that are recorded and stored under their names. And when Andy has his first baby aptly named Andy Junior the cycle is started all over again. These data points, some publicly accessible others safeguarded to various degrees by companies and agencies that collect and store this data make Andy's identity as it forms even before he himself begins to shape it. And Andy's digital dossier will even grow after his death. Photos or videos of a funeral with many messages on MSN Messenger or his Facebook status posts. Andy probably never knew how large his dossier was. How aware are you of the tracks you leave behind? Want to learn more about your digital dossier? That's advertising, John. So, thank you very much. Obviously this was just the beginning of the conversation. We'll continue tomorrow. Thank you very much, John and Marco.