Bowing to the Whims of the Net Generation
The Chronicle of Higher Education article The Net Generation Goes to College commences:
Change your teaching style. Make blogs, iPods, and video games part of your pedagogy. And learn to accept divided attention spans. A new generation of students has arrived — and sorry, but they might not want to hear you lecture for an hour.
Obviously the article is not intended to encourage educators who are hesitant to adopt new tools in the classroom. I want to emphasize TOOLS here. The blogs, iPods, and video games may encourage the application of new theoretical approaches, in some cases even necessitate them–but the tools themselves are merely that—supportive materials to enable the student to reach the learning objectives.
In a conversation with John DoE the other evening, something he said resonated when I read this article. He pointed out that if it weren’t for the introduction of tools such as computers in the classroom, we never would have critically examined teaching practices in the traditional (lecture-based) classroom. There has been a shift in education where there have been new strategies and approaches–a fact which is alluded to in the article because it may be driving the observed differences in students’ expectations of the learning experience.:
“In grade school, they [the Millenials] were pushed to collaboration,” which explains the popularity of group study in college today, Mr. Sweeney says. “The collaboration,” he adds, “is both in-person and virtual.”
There’s other causes for concern in the article. It sounds like universities are being pressured to entertain rather than EDUCATE students. And the premise is that the only way to grab the attention of these kids who are mentally synced with their PDAs is to add gadgetry to the classroom. However, using these tools just to use them rather than for sound pedagogical reasons could potentially be destructive to the education process. There are countless ways to integrate interactive, collaborative and “minds on” strategies in instruction without necessarily using these tools. In fact, it seems the technology the article is forgetting to emphasize is, in fact, pedagogy. Additionally, as any Instructional Technologist is aware, when the technology works, it is WONDERFUL. When it doesn’t, it can waste tremendous amounts of time.
Finally, not all students born in a certain time have been exposed to the same experiences. Not all students may feel comfortable multi-tasking, and could be turned off by classroom interactions that require that (such as simulataneous lecture with enabled text chat—and incidentally, it has been demonstrated that humans are physically incapable of paying equal attention to multiple streams of information, ie, text and audio that are not complementary). Not all students are “plugged in” all the time. Not all students enjoy gaming or IM or group collaboration. Furthermore, many universities still have many students who are “non-traditional” students, who are not of the Net Generation and may or may not have the same interests. It is essential to provide learning experiences that address these issues by being rooted in cognitive psychology and that don’t alienate students who are not motivated by using new technologies.
