It's About Learning

According to Don Tapscott’s research detailed in Grown Up Digital, understanding the following eight differentiating characteristics, or as he likes to call them Net Generation Norms, is central to understanding how this generation is changing work, markets, learning, the family and society.

They want freedom from everything they do, from freedom of choice to freedom of expression.

• Choice is like oxygen.
• In contrast — older generations are overwhelmed by choice.
• Use technology to act on choice.

They love to customize, personalize.

• MySpace
• Facebook
• MyGovernment Portal…
• Billion dollar tuner industry
• Clothes, shoes, themselves

They are the new scrutinizers.

• Transparency is crucial.
• Consumer – prosumer.
• Analyze massive amounts of data when making decisions.
• Values matter.

They look for corporate integrity and openness when deciding what to buy and were to work.

• Goes hand in hand with transparency because the Internet strips away barriers.
• Look at corporate values to see if they align with their own.

The Net Gen wants entertainment and play at their work, education and social life.

• Interactive games – 82% of children from 2-17 have regular access to video games.
• Video Games – $46.5 billion by 2010.
• A generation bred on the interactive experience.

They are the collaboration & relationship generation.

• Facebook.
• Warcraft & other multi-user games.
• Texting.
• Peer influence more important than advertising.

The Net Gen has a need for speed — not just video games.

• Real time chats–every instant message should result in an instant response.
• Faster technology.

They are the Innovators

• Change/innovation is the norm.
• Boomers = glacial
• Net Gen = hyperdrive

Perhaps one of more important chapters/sections of this book deal with the Net Generation as learners. Tapscott summarizes the section with the following:

School 2.0 – Seven strategies that will help you become a better teacher (page 148).

1. Don’t throw technology into the classroom and hope for good things. Focus on the change in pedagogy, not the technology. Learning 2.0 is about dramatically changing the relationship between the teacher and students in the learning process. Get that right and use technology for student focused, customize, collaborative learning environment.
2. Cut back on lecturing. You don’t have all the answers. Besides broadcast learning doesn’t work for this generation. Start asking students questions and listen to their answers. Listen to the questions students asked too. Let them discover the answer. Let them co-create a learning experience with you.
3. Empower students to collaborate. Encourage them to work with each other and show them how to access the world of subject matter experts available on the web.
4. Focus on lifelong learning, not teaching to the test. It’s not what they know when they graduate that counts; it’s their capacity and love for lifelong learning that’s important. Don’t worry if kids forget the dates of key battles of history. They can look them up. Focus on teaching them how to learn — not what to know.
5. Use technology to get to know each student and build self-paced, customized learning programs for them.
6. Design educational programs according to the eight norms. There should be choice, customization, transparency, integrity, collaboration, fun, speed, and innovation in their learning experiences. Leverage the strengths of Net Gen culture and behaviors and project-based learning.
7. Reinvent yourself as a teacher, Professor, or educator. You too can say, “Now, I can hardly wait to get up in the morning to go to work!”

The key to School 2.0 is that the instructor puts pedagogy first and focuses on the learner, the learning environment and the learning itself. Ironically, Tapscott only talks about technology specifically in point five and emphasizes the need to use to technology to “get to know each student and build self-paced, customized learning programs.”

Not everyone agrees with Tapscot. Mark Bullen the Associate Dean,  Learning & Teaching Centre, BC Institute of Technology has created the Net Gen Nonsense Blog and offers his review of Grown Up Digital in the post: Tapscott Strikes Again. Bullen states that the blog is:

dedicated to debunking the myth of the net generation, particularly as it relates to learning, teaching and the use of technology. By using this forum I hope to start a conversation around this issue and promote an informed discussion of strategies that post secondary institutions can use to harness the power of Web 2.0 and other learning technologies that is based in fact not rhetoric.

Despite the goals of the blog, Bullen does miss his own mark regarding informed discussions by offering a criticism of Tapscotts book, Grown Up Digital, by only reading the book jacket and comparing it to the Tapscott’s earlier work. To be fair to Bullen his blog does offer some interesting perspectives.
Another critic of Tapscott is Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University who has worked as a Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw studies about culture and American life. In his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, Bauerlein makes the argument that despite all this exposure to digital media:

…most young people in the United States neither read literature (or fully know how), work reliably (just ask employers), visit cultural institutions (of any sort), nor vote (most can’t even understand a simple ballot). They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount foundations of American history, or name any of their local political representatives.

The fundamental premise to his argument is that the technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their minds had the opposite effect because screen based text/reading has been dumbed down to such a low level that is isn’t intellectually stimulating.

While there is some merit to Bauerlein’s argument and it is true that traditional print media has greater amounts and frequency of higher order vocabulary the blame cannot be placed on solely on technology. The deployment of technology in the traditional classroom has not gone much beyond PowerPoint replacing overheads and digital course packs hosted on an LMS replacing photocopied materials so if there is any blame to be placed it may not fall on technology at all. Could an educational system that places an emphasis on rote memorization, the delivery of content and standardized testing have as much or perhaps even more to do with this problem.

Regardless of who or what is to blame (assuming that blame is even due) Net Generation learners are who they are and it is our (educators) responsibility to recognize their preparedness for learning and create learning environments that meet their needs, are engaging and significant.