Grown Up Digital
Everything you need to know about ‘Net Geners'
by John F. Prescott
A colleague who used to love teaching complained recently that he now hated it because his students expected everything to be given to them. He characterized them as unresponsive, disinterested, lazy, easily distracted and focused just on passing the exam. Our civilization seems doomed if the unheard-of actions of this generation continue.
Sounds familiar? The last sentence is from a Sumerian cuneiform tablet of 4,000 years ago, quoted by Canadian author Don Tapscott in a new book, Grown Up Digital, that probably should be essential reading for every university professor in Canada, even the ones who aren't as burned-out as my colleague. It is a follow-up to and considerable expansion on his book Growing Up Digital written a decade ago, before this “Net Generation” was old enough to have laptops and cell phones, not to mention iPhones or BlackBerries.
There seems no doubt that the “Net Geners” have brains that have been partially formed by Microsoft. The average 20-year-old male university student has spent 20,000 hours on the Internet, about the same number of hours as his boomer parents spent as kids slumped passively in front of their TVs. In fact, and it may be related, the IQs of the Net Gen are higher than those of their parents.
As a powerful antidote to my disillusioned colleague, Mr. Tapscott (a business consultant and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto) is almost high on the power and potential of a generation raised on the Internet. He points to the unprecedented election of Barack Obama as an example of possibility of Net Geners for overturning the old ways of doing almost everything. They and the digital era provided the Obama campaign with a million instant “friends” on Facebook, quickly mobilizing citizen democracy and funds. Whereas the pre-digital social network consists of about 150 people (the size of a university department or scientific subspecialty and limited to the number of people you can talk to), the digital social networking world expands this to about 700, because of the ability on sites like Facebook for people to bond socially, both rapidly and meaningfully, writes Mr. Tapscott. Our students are all on Facebook.
The book, based on corporate-funded research and analysis involving 11,000 Net Geners, comes across almost as a love-fest for this generation by the author. He sees the defining characteristics of Net Gens as collaboration, innovation, integrity, activism, love of freedom, desire for customization, and expectation of speed, perhaps coupled with impatience at living in a society that is still heavily organized for the pre-Internet world.
This is all a stunning paradigm shift for humanity. Where do universities and university teaching fit into the digital world? Neither I nor most professors I know are taking advantage of the considerable potential for teaching and learning offered by the new technologies. He has seven tips for educators wanting to join the School of 2.0:
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don't throw technology into the classroom and hope for good things. Focus on changing the pedagogy, not the technology;
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cut back on lecturing;
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empower students to collaborate;
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focus on lifelong learning, not teaching to the test;
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use technology to get to know each student and build self-paced programs for them;
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design educational programs that leverage the norms of Net Geners;
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reinvent yourself as an educator.
While this may be good advice, I think he's wrong in some of his analysis of education. He thinks it is focused on acquiring an inventory of knowledge, whereas good professors have always tried to teach critical thinking and a love of learning, among other things. What professors generally lack is an appreciation of what technologies are available, and how they can be used to better engage the Net Gen in learning
The strength of the book, however, is really in its description of the Net Gen's mind-set and abilities. He analyzes how the generation that we're now teaching live, think, learn, work and socialize. Good teachers understand their audience, and this book will help them understand. Professors could build on these insights to enlist the skills of this generation to improve learning. Dr. Tapscott notes the paradox, typical of the digital paradigm shift, that young people are the teachers when it comes to learning the fast-changing technologies.
Other chapters discuss the eight Net Gen norms, the Net Gen brain (how different is it really?), the Net Gen in the workforce, as consumers, in the family, as a force for changing how we practise democracy. This is a lovely, provocative, somewhat utopian, insightful (though slightly repetitive) and easy read that could change your attitudes, and even your life. Isn't that what education is about?
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing your World, by Don Tapscott. McGraw Hill, Toronto, 2009, 368 pages.
Dr. Prescott teaches at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. He highly recommends the e-mail newsletter “Tomorrow's Professor,” sponsored by the Stanford Teaching and Learning Centre.
