When I speak to audiences about the implications of our children growing up in online or virtual spaces, I usually start out with a story about Melissa, a 13-year-old who called herself “You know you want me 13” in AOL chatrooms. Melissa introduced me to social media when I was a journalist and she was a newbie adolescent in search of “a certain kind of attention” (her words, not mine); what struck me most at the time was not that a middle-class kid was trolling for “hotties,” but that her mother had no clue about what her daughter was up to. Turns out, neither did the 5,000 parents who emailed me after I wrote the column to ask whether “You know you want me 13” — whom I did not identify by name — was actually their daughter.
That was almost a decade ago.
Today, parents remain relatively clueless about their children’s online activities, except that many still inexplicably engage in a kind of proud hilarity about how much more advanced their six-year-olds are than they will ever be when it comes to technology use.
That divide – in authority, in knowledge, in experience, in understanding – represents one of the most significant shifts in parent-child relationships in the history of the modern American family (which is a social construct that emerged in the late 1800s, but that’s a blog posting for another day….).
And it mirrors, to a significant extent, the disconnect between educators (raised and educated in an analog, linear world) and the digital natives who now populate their classrooms.
Recent research reports that most American four-year-olds have used a computer. Ninety percent of Americans 18-29 say they go online when they want to relax. And virtually all college students have cell phones.
In other words, our students – current and future – are wired. They live through – as opposed to at – the screen. And they have never lived in a world that was not defined and shaped by digital technologies.
Consider that:
- Today’s college freshmen were born the same year that Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web;
- They were fourth graders when Sean Fanning invented Napster – the last time in our media history when anybody under the age of 30 truly believed they would ever have to pay for music again;
- They were middle-schoolers when Wikipedia, Skype and the Ipod appeared – just imagine their amusement when their teachers today suggest that such technologies are either new or cool (it’s the equivalent of our parents calling our blue jeans “groovy”: ouch!)
- They started high school as podcasts hit the Internet (little wonder that they’re not impressed when their instructors boast that they’re now posting podcasts on ITunes);
- They were sophomores when YouTube arrived (which had permanent and important impacts on their sense of privacy, identity and celebrity: YouTube and reality television have convinced most teens that they will inevitably be famous….for what? Doesn’t matter….)
- And they have been both consumers and producers of mediated messages for as long as they can remember.
As a result of their experiences with and immersion in digital technologies, students today bring to our classrooms a different set of operating assumptions about everything from power relations to the authority of knowledge.
Increasingly, knowledge is about access rather than storage: Why carry all that data around in their brains when they know they can access it a keyboard stroke? I required my journalism students to complete a map of Africa during a classroom quiz; a group of them promptly went to their computers to find the information online. When I objected, they challenged me. “Africa changes constantly,” said the most vocal. “Why should I memorize a map when I can look it up on my phone?” I stopped and considered. “What if you don’t have your phone?” I asked him. “But I DO have my phone,” he said. “I always have my phone.” He’s right. He does. And I don’t always have an accurate picture of the current state of African political geography inside my head. In a match of wits – at least with me — the phone wins.
Increasingly, the authority of knowledge – call it wisdom, call it credentials, call it respecting your elders – cannot be assumed. A group of faculty came to me when I was a dean to complain that their freshmen students were out of control. Why? Because they were fact-checking faculty lectures – during the faculty lectures – and either tweeting corrections to one another or raising their hands to inform the instructor that he or she was mistaken. The faculty were outraged at what they considered intolerable rudeness – but in fact, it was about everything but etiquette. When every student has instantaneous access to the intellectual property of a wired world, the person standing at the front of the room must earn – rather than simply claim – the authority of knowledge. And when that authority is our stock in trade, our currency in the marketplace of the classroom, that shift represents profound and perplexing challenges to the status quo.
Increasingly, our students live their lives in a state of continuous partial attention. The ability to complete tasks efficiently while simultaneously processing a complex combination of audio, visual, and text messages is a necessary life and work skill. Research shows that our cognitive efficiency declines as the ‘noise’ increases – and yet each of us knows all too well that our professional environments are characterized by the chaos of a digital culture. We have to be able to tweet, text, talk, and type – often simultaneously. And our students do that not only by choice but by habit.
When sociologist Henry Jenkins was at MIT, he proposed a new paradigm for teaching and learning that situated the lived experiences of digital natives within the context of new kinds of skills and understandings. In his view, educated citizens in a “participatory media culture” must master play, performance, multitasking, collective intelligences, transmedia navigation, negotiation, networking, judgment, appropriation and distributed cognition. In other words, they must effectively navigate the complex, collaborative and dynamic digital environments in which they will produce intellectual and creative capital.
Today, educators are struggling to understand what that all means – not just to their students, but to their own ways of being in the world – and in the classroom.
They’re recognizing that the familiar, comfortable, analog ways of teaching and learning will no longer suffice.
And they’re coming to understand that everything they need is right there at their fingertips.
It’s there when they assign their students a Twitter group, and ask them to tweet comments throughout a class discussion.
It’s there when they assign students to fact-check their lectures – during delivery.
It’s there when they post YouTube videos instead of delivering lectures, when they Skype optional review sessions, when they hold class meetings in Second Life.
It’s there when they’re willing to try the next thing, the next approach, the next widget – because there always will be yet another one.
And it’s there when they recognize that this isn’t rocket science (as my physics teacher used to tell me).
It’s just teaching and learning — in a digital age.
