Teaching the Net Generation

No longer the Gen-Xers or Gen-Yers or even the Millennials, the new generation of students heading to college is now the “Net Generation”: raised on MTV, the Internet, Instant Messaging, MySpace.com. They want to interact with their peers on a network; they need and want and learn best from auditory and visual content. They keep blogs; they listen to podcasts; and they write for wikis. They make hundreds if not thousands of virtual friends on MySpace and FaceBook. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that they don’t like to read, at least not extended pieces of complex academic prose. They seem different from us and don’t always share our values.

This shift in sensibility in the Net Generation has pedagogical implications for us. Marc Prensky, in his seminal article “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” writes, “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” [emphasis in original]. But to start understanding those implications we need a more careful detailing of characteristics of the Net generation. Exactly in what ways are their learning styles and needs different? What strategies seem to work with them? What new strategies do we need to adopt? What strategies we’ve always used seem to work still?

More and more educational researchers are beginning to explore the Net Generation, but here I will take the lead from three works: Jason Frand’s “Information Age Mindset” in the September/October 2000 EDUCAUSE, James Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy, and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.

Friedman’s book is the farthest-reaching and most insightful of the looks into the world our Net Generation students will be facing, a world created, ironically, by the Internet. Gee’s book looks at students’ video games habit for insights into their learning styles and how the underlying principles of video games powerfully shape, cognitively and socially, our students. And Frand’s article, published in 2000, is prophetic in its understanding of the students who have grown up in what he calls The Information Age, students that Prensky labels “Digital Natives,” or what is coming to be called The Net Generation. Frand lists ten characteristics of this generation:

1.    Computers Aren’t Technology

2.    Internet Better Than TV

3.    Reality No Longer Real

4.    Doing Rather Than Knowing

5.    Nintendo Over Logic

6.    Multitasking Way Of Life

7.    Typing Rather Than Handwriting

8.    Staying Connected

9.    Zero Tolerance For Delays

10.    Consumer/Creator Blurring

Most of these are self-explanatory and affect our pedagogy in straightforward ways. However, I want to concentrate on three of these for their deeper pedagogical implications: Nintendo over Logic, Staying Connected, and Consumer/Creator blurring.

Nintendo Logic

I choose to rename Frand’s category here because, in reading Gee, it becomes apparent to me that the kind of thinking that goes into learning a video game is a kind of logic, not the kind of ratiocination that would be recognized by Sherlock Holmes, but its own kind of logic. It’s characterized by trial and error, starting over when you fail, and rushing (willy-nilly, many of us would say) into actions without figuring out the consequences first. If you die in a video game, you just reboot and try again. Frand explains, “The fastest way to winning is through losing, since each loss is a learning experience.” The Net Generation learns by making mistakes, lots of them, in rapid-fire order.

Consumer/Creator Blurring

Older generations kept a clear distinction between producers and those who used what others produced. Not so any longer. The Net Generation read others’ MySpace pages and create their own, often incorporating others’ work into their own. Go to Amazon.com and browse for a while and you realize that Amazon has kept track of your results and will show you the “Page you Made.” Anyone can create a slideshow on Flickr, a website on GeoCities, a podcast, a blog; anyone can help create a wiki.

Staying Connected

This it seems to me is the most identifiable and most singular characteristic of the Net Generation. Adding to the already strong urge of 18-25 year olds to connect, the means of connecting digitally have increased exponentially. The networking of the continents with high-speed fiber-optic cable has intensified everything: Instant messages, cell phones, Facebook walls: these are normal routines for our students. Speaking of the differences between Digital Natives (them) and Digital Immigrants (us), Prensky explains that when we are confronted with a problem we want to look up the answer, preferably in a printed and fixed text. When our students want an answer, they IM or phone someone. Our students live in social networks, so it stands to reason they learn best in social networks.

Implications for Instruction

How do we teach our students who seem to embody all that we have rejected in learning: trial and error, doing rather than watching and listening, getting answers from their network? Some of the answers are common knowledge, and commonly ignored in pedagogy. Some are threatening.

Learning to Learn

First, we must teach them how to learn. Facts are transitory (remember when your high school geography class taught you to find Yugoslavia on the map?) Students must be taught how to acquire and make new knowledge throughout their lives, not filled full of facts. Teach them how physicists think and operate: tell them about the Michelson-Morley experiment that failed. Where do you go to find information and what do you do with it? That’s the skill the Net Generation needs.

Critical thinking about the Internet

Critical thinking has been the educational buzzword for a long time, so much so that we have probably all wearied of it, but never has it been more important than now. We and our students are surrounded by tempting media imagery and immersed in the Internet. Our government lies to us daily. Or maybe it doesn’t; who knows? There is so much information and misinformation and disinformation out there our students are just drowning in it. They need to know how to find the best information in the ocean of bad stuff. For us, finding information was the hard part (remember card catalogs in libraries: hours of work to turn up two sources?) For our students, a few milliseconds on Google can turn up tens of millions of sources, most of which are irrelevant at best and flawed at worst. We must teach our students how to evaluate sources.

Nurture the Right Brain

In the world our students are heading into, Daniel Pink writes, “Technologies…can outperform human left brains” (quoted by Friedman 306). As a result, right-brain skills such as creating, empathizing, designing, telling stories, mixing media, seeing patterns and imagining unexpected possibilities, and embracing diverse points of view must become frontmost in our pedagogies. Two examples from Friedman: the accountant who paints watercolors because he loves to; the lawyer who writes screenplays. Fortunately, these are the skills our students bring to us; we just have to nurture those skills.

Interdisciplinary Breadth over Disciplinary Depth

This I know is anathema to us: the whole point of our Ph.D. is more and more knowledge about smaller and smaller subject areas. There are dissertations on “the use of the second person pronoun in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies.” We used to need, in the industrial age, such deep bases of knowledge; now we need cross-disciplinary visionaries, the “slash” scholar: the architect/musician, the sociologist/biologist, the poet/forensic scientist, the CPA/painter. These are the people, right-brained critical thinkers, who can survive and, indeed, lead the Information Age.

Three Words: Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate

Students learn best by trial and error and by being connected to networks. If you want students to learn your stuff and develop the habits of professionals in your field, treat it like a video game—make them love it passionately, give them lots of opportunities to try and fail—to get killed and to reboot, as it were. Forget “get it right the first time” (both for their learning styles and for their survival in the flat world).

The Lone Ranger is dead; if he hadn’t died the Internet would have killed him. Give the Net Generation lots of opportunities to network—build listservs and discussion boards and IMs and chat. And wikis. I know wikis are controversial, for they challenge the hegemony static knowledge has held over Western culture, or at least Western education. But if you think about it, wikis are an instantiation of the model of knowledge-building as it’s always been but we never realized. Wikis have it all—collaboration, intensity, enforced fair-mindedness, multiple points of view, and a de-centering of knowledge.

Multimedia-Rich Learning Experiences

You need to create your own multimedia: make websites, create podcasts, build Flash simulations, make your PowerPoints more than just bullet-points of accepted facts. And yes, you buy or borrow or find multimedia for your students. But even more important, let them create! Let them make videos; assign them blogs rather than journals; let them make their own podcasts and PowerPoints and websites.

Stop Lecturing

This is extreme, I know. We love lectures; we love listening to great minds and great speakers in action; we deep down probably believe that we’re pretty good at teaching by lecture. But what all of the above boils down to is this: for our students, and for the world they are entering, lecturing is absolutely the worst way of teaching the Net Generation. It hurts, I know.

Finally, in a nutshell we must:

1. •Replace Lone-Ranger activities with collaborative ones (wikis instead of essays and tests, for example)
   

2. •Have students create multimedia not just consume it
   

3. •Build networks: listservs, discussion boards, chats, IMs, wikis
   

4. •Highlight controversies and disputes in our fields not just dispense the current theories
   

5. •Encourage students to make right-brain connections.
   

I end with a passage from Frand: “The industrial age has become the information age, and thus the way we organize our institutions must change.”

[This is based on Rick Branscomb’s Opening Day 2006 talk, a podcast of which may be found at http://www.salemstate.edu/~rbranscomb/.]

Rick Branscomb, English Department

Beacon, a regular column of ASpect, features noteworthy items in the School of Arts and Sciences.