The Revolution Will Not be Televised (It will be podcasted!)
I first want to apologize for the atrocious title to this article. Both to you the reader and to Gil Scott-Heron. Really, I should know better. But...I couldn't resist. But really, there is a reason for this title. Today, as I was sitting in a pre-semester professional development workshop on campus on teaching first year students, David Langley mentioned a few "assumptions" about the new generation of students coming into college. Nearly all of these rang true to me. So, as soon as I could, I got a copy of this report (authored by Diana Oblinger) and these ideas have been on my mind ever since. (as an aside, if you work at the U and don't know David, you should. In fact, you should know everyone at CTL, as they have proven to be some of the most valuable contacts I have found at the U of MN.)
These come from the Texas Association of Community College's "Educating the NetGen: Strategies that Work." In it, Diana Oblinger provides Jason Frand's description of ten attributes that people of an information have as a mind-set. Basically, I'll quote a few ideas and then give my thoughts on them. And, as I think you'll agree, thinking about these assumptions may help to drastically change what assumptions you have of students entering your classes as well as might help you to understand what practices can really help them.
* Computers aren't technology. Students have never known life with out computers and the Internet. To them the computer is not a technology - it is an assumed part of life.
A lot of times when I sit in on workshops, a lot of instructors (even some who are within a couple years or so of this generation) speak of "adding technology" to their class as if it is a dash of pepper or a pinch of salt. A little technology here, a little technology there. Little islands of controlled technology. To a student of the millennial generation, this is a very odd concept indeed. They are used to technology being seamless, integrated, and holistic. I asked a couple of my colleagues who work out in the "real world" in corporate jobs if their boss would only let them use the internet while at work every other week for a couple hours. They gave me very justified dumb looks. If this is how you treat technology in your classes, as an "object" that you just "add" to your class, your students will not recognize this landscape and will probably see less of a connection to what you are doing in class to their own personal lives.
* The Internet is better than TV. In recent years, the number of hours spent watching TV has declined, being supplanted by time online. Reasons for this change include interactivity and the increased usage of the internet for socializing.
I've already written on social computing and the role it may play in education, but I will add this: Why is the internet better than TV? Because it allows active participation. A lecture is like TV: you are a passive viewer. You can connect the dots from here. Further, you have to remember that watching TV on the internet is still watching TV. Even more, listening to a lecture on an iPod is still listening to a lecture. What makes sites like YouTube so engaging is that you aren't just watching video, you are making videos, responding to videos, and sharing videos. It is the active participation that drives the content, not the content that drives the active participation.
* Reality is no longer real. Things that appear real over the internet may not be. Digital images may have been altered. E-mail addresses sent from someone's address may not have come from that person. And the content may not be accurate.
I want to add something to this, and that is that most students exist in this world knowingly. That is, they are not fooled by photoshopped documents. They understand that many times websites are showing biased and slanted information. In fact, a lot of times I think they understand this better than people of older generations. True, many instructors have witnessed students taking a website as fact. But not because they don't know. Something much more ground shaking is going on.
What is different is not only do students recognize the relativistic notion of truth on the internet, they accept it as a larger truth. I know this may be one of the more radical things I will say in this entry. The break down between generations happen when instructors still harbor a more platonic, more objective notion of truth. That is, the truth exists and it is out there and we can discover it.
To students who have grown up on the internet, everything is truth and nothing is truth. Things are so many shades of grey that they do not and will not recognize black and white. What is true to the internet generation is what is true to them individually. They are free and able to actively choose or deny knowledge, and consequently are active participants in the production of what is "true" and "false."
Contrast that to the traditional classroom where "truth" exists within the domain of an instructor's authority. If a person of the internet generation cannot be a part of that creation and acceptance (or denial) of knowledge and truth, it becomes something external to them and something that they will have a hard time connecting to. This all leads into...
* Doing is more important than knowing. Knowledge is no longer perceived to be the ultimate goal, particularly in light of the fact that the half-life of knowledge is so short. Results and actions are considered more important than the accumulation of facts.
I hear so many times that instructors fear the "copy-and-paste" culture and all the plagiarism it might produce. I say, if there is information to be had on the internet, why not use it? The traditional point of many types of papers has been to prove to instructors that students have memorized particular facts. However, in the information age where these facts are always at our fingertips, the need for memorization is far less important. The more important questions are "can you find the information?" and "can you analyze this information?"
Plagiarism is not the fault of the internet, it is the fault of poorly written essay prompts. Most times, these essay prompts are poorly written because they misunderstand or do not recognize this shift in emphasis from content mastery to higher order thinking skills (i.e., it isn't what you know, but what you can do with what you know). Besides, the internet is not going away. Wishing it didn't exist is reactionary and non-productive.
* Multitasking is a way of life. Students appear to be quite comfortable when engaged in multiple activities simultaneously, such as listening to music, sending instant messaging, doing homework, and chatting on the phone.
This realization has truly unlocked the door to collaborative learning designing in my own classes. Knowing that students are comfortable and even prefer to be doing a few things at one time has allowed me to step back from the more traditional "graduated scaffolding" concept and more to a more multi-directional concept. What I mean is this: instead of forcing students to labor through one small individual assignment after another which will lead up to one big one, I structure my assignments now so that each assignment leads to multiple areas of investigation. At this time, I really don't know how to articulate why I think this works other than to say...it just does.
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My perception is that many times older faculty approach technology with a sense of suspicion. Sometimes they have outright hostility towards it. More often than not, however, I get a sense that a lot of instructors are in some way yearning for learning environments that mirror what they were raised with. It is hard to see the system in which a person has had so much success in be supplanted by a different one.
But it comes down to this: if we want to know what the future will be, we need look no further than into the lives of our students. After all, they are the ones who will define what is to be after we are long gone. To try to force them to accept ideas and beliefs that were true in a time that has passed makes no sense. If we're helping students to prepare to enter the real world and to be productive, contributing members of that world, we have to help prepare them within their world. This means not forcing the students to come to us, but going to where the students are.
By doing so, institutional change will not come from the top, but from the bottom where the students are. Pedagogies and theories of education will have to shift to re-align themselves with this new mind-set that is driving our culture. Through this, the very foundations of many commonly held beliefs in academia will be thrown into question, and ultimately may not survive.