Technology and Learning in Higher Ed: Looking Beyond the Millenials
1. Technology and Learning in Higher Ed: Looking Beyond the Millenials April 2007 Lesley Blicker Director of IMS Learning and Next Generation Technology Minnesota State Colleges and Universities [email_address]
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10. Forest Park High School Digital Video Media Segment – The Millenials at School Digital Natives Source: Marc Prensky, 2001. “ Every time I go to school I have to power down,” complains a high-school student.
11. "If I'm not texting my friends over the cell phone, I have my laptop with me and I'm IM'ing them. Or I'm doing research on Google. Honestly, the only reason any of my college friends use the library is for group meetings." --Andrea Thomas, senior, Miami University Source: C/Net News.com Special Report: Taking Back the Web: New Generation Technologies Return Net to Social Roots. http://news.com.com/2009-1025-5944666-3.html Always Connected
Education oriented: College-directed goals take hold as early as the first year of high school. They decide which learning techniques work best: includes lecture notes online, viewing interactive media or digitial images, reading the text, or working in groups.
Make conscious choices about what learning techniques work best for them Immediacy: of everything from customer service to performance feedback.
(visual images as representations, rise of 3D spaces - all giving rise to a representational competence
Some educators object to the the pressure to reshape higher education to meet the Millenial expectations. They assert that the move to incorporate technology, reduce lecture time, and reshape assignments to engage impatient Net Geners merely caters to a lack of discipline. Net Geners do typically lack information literacy skills and their critical thinking skills can be weak (Oblinger and Oblinger 2005).
What explains these shifts in learning styles? The more independent learning style has grown out of the ingrained habits of seeking and retrieving information from the Internet, or game environments, which marks a striking contrast from previous generations of students, who acquired information, if not passively, from authority figures and the written text.
Prensky says: Based on the latest research in neurobiology, there is no longer any question that stimulation of various kinds actually changes brain structures and affects the way people think. The brain is, to an extent not at all understood or believed to be when Baby Boomers were growing up, massively plastic. It can be, and is, constantly reorganized .
Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to ? Often from the Natives’ point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience – and then they blame them for not paying attention!
Cell phones, iPods, MP3 Players Xbox, Sony Playstation iPhone combines three amazing products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device.
A recent study from Pew Internet and American Life found that more than half of all teens online--12 million kids--create original material for the Web, whether it's through a blog, home page or school Web site, with original artwork, photos or video. A large portion of that active group also will creatively "remix" other material from the Web to create something unique.