Web Monthly

School Library Monthly/Volume XXVI, Number 8/April 2010

Teaching Generations and Generations of Teachers, Part II

by Greg Byerly

Part I of this series ("Generations by Generations") delineated the different generations of Americans and provided Web sites describing the characteristics of generations ranging from GI and the Baby Boomers through the X, Y, and Z generations. Part II addresses how these generations are affecting education today.

Both educators and parents of today's students are from different generations. The impact of technology, most notably the Internet and the Web, has created a new generation of digital natives. Generations have often clashed in the past and generations today are no exception. Fortunately, there is new research and initiatives to address these cross-generational issues, especially as they impact education.

If this topic sounds less than exciting or if you doubt the urgency of changing education to better meet the needs of these digital natives, I suggest that you view the videos listed at the end of this article. Then return and check out the Web sites highlighted here.

Web Sites

Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning
http://digitallearning.macfound.org/
This is a great place to start. In 2006, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation committed $50 million to a five-year initiative to "build the emerging field of digital media and learning." The effort has been very successful and prolific to date in "seeking to answer questions such as: Are young people fundamentally different because of their exposure to technology? What environments and experiences capture their interest and contribute to their learning? What are the implications for education?"

Design, Administer, and Analyze a Generation Gap Survey
http://www.microsoft.com/education/gengap.mspx
Use this lesson with high school students to give them "a real life lesson in sociology as they formulate a hypothesis about the attitudinal differences between generations, test their hypothesis with a survey, chart their findings, and present their answers to the class." No information is presented about teaching different generations, but this site can serve as an introduction to the variety of lesson plans and other educator materials available from Microsoft.

Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/
This Web site accompanied Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, a PBS FRONTLINE documentary broadcast on February 2, 2010. This presentation was a follow-up report to another highly regarded FRONTLINE video from 2008, Growing Up Online (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/). Digital Nation dealt with the impact of the Web and digital media in five areas: Living Faster, Relationships, Waging War, Virtual Worlds, and Learning. The Learning segment has interviews that address issues such as "A New Generation of Teachers," "Education 2.0," and "The Class of the Future."

Digital Natives
http://www.digitalnative.org/#home
This Web site first appears to be a dead end, with only icons for a blog, a wiki, and books, plus links to such sites as YouTube, Facebook, del.ico.us, and Twitter. But in all cases you are linked to resources provided by the Digital Natives project, an interdisciplinary collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen. This remarkable project, the entity behind Born Digital and other books, aims to "understand and support young people as they grow up in a digital age."

Digital Youth Research
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/
Digital Youth Research is a three-year collaborative effort by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, which explores "how kids use digital media in their everyday lives." One significant finding is that "to stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media." The final report, Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project, is available, but the findings are also reported in a series of videos (see below, From MySpace to Hip Hop). The report was also expanded into a bestselling book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press, November 2009).

Leading Gen Y Teachers: Emerging Strategies for School Leaders
http://www.tqsource.org/publications/February2009Brief.pdf
This twenty-page research and policy study from the National Comprehensive Center for Teaching Quality in Washington, DC, in February 2009 "focuses on strategies to recruit, retain, and support Gen Y teachers and ensure that the teaching profession benefits from their talent." It provides an excellent overview of Gen Y and cites various lessons that can be learned from the private sector. The report then offers ten realistic strategies for school leaders to use to encourage and support new Gen Y teachers.

From MySpace to Hip Hop, A MacArthur Forum
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rS9UTz-hi0
This is a series of three videos that report the findings of the Digital Youth Research project (http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/). This ethnographic study was unique because of its size and scope. It is "comprised of twenty-two case studies, by twenty-five researchers, with over seven hundred interviews, and over 5,000 observations, both online and offline." The second video features Mimi Ito, University of Southern California, who was one of the leaders of the study; if you want to view only one presentation, this is the one.

Growing Up Online
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/
Growing Up Online, a PBS FRONTLINE presentation broadcast in January 2008, investigated "just how radically is the Internet transforming the experience of childhood" and how "teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers." The original program is available for viewing, but of equal value are the resources in the Readings & Links, Interviews, and Teacher’s Guide sections.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
This article by Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, created a lot of conversation and controversy when it was published in The Atlantic in July/August 2008. If you didn’t read it then, consider it required reading now. Carr uses a haunting analogy from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to demonstrate the "essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence."

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=6&serid=178
These reports are from the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative, Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning ((a href="http://digitallearning.macfound.org/" target="_blank">http://digitallearning.macfound.org/). All are available for purchase, but are also available for free download. Titles include The Future of Thinking (March 2010), Living and Learning with New Media (June 2009), and The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (June 2009). These are well worth your time, even if you only skim through them.

Leading Gen Y Teachers: Emerging Strategies for School Leaders
http://www.tqsource.org/publications/February2009Brief.pdf
This twenty-page research and policy study from the National Comprehensive Center for Teaching Quality in Washington, DC, in February 2009 "focuses on strategies to recruit, retain, and support Gen Y teachers and ensure that the teaching profession benefits from their talent." It provides an excellent overview of Gen Y and cites various lessons that can be learned from the private sector. The report then offers ten realistic strategies for school leaders to use to encourage and support new Gen Y teachers.

Marc Prensky — Writing
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/
Marc Prensky, author of Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning (Corwin, 2010) and Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2001), is credited with creating the term "digital native" in 2001. While this Web site is a promotional effort to sell his books and services, he does make available many of his articles and other publications. As an expert and speaker on educating digital natives, his writings are worth reading. Start with "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants—A New Way to Look at Ourselves and Our Kids" and "H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom."

A Teacher’s Guide to Generation X Parents
http://www.edutopia.org/generation-x-parents-relationships-guide#
It's not just assimilating Gen Y teachers into the profession; it is also dealing with Gen X parents. This brief guide is very good and will help teachers understand how Gen X parents are different from parents in the past. However, the most valuable aspect of this link is the connection with Edutopia™, the "new world of learning" advocated and supported by The George Lucas Educational Foundation. After reading the article, explore this innovative Web site.

Videos

If you want to understand how the Web and digital media have changed today's students, you must better understand their world. If you want to understand their attitudes toward school and classes, you must get their opinions. One way to do that is to view the following three pairs of videos. All are available on YouTube, but these are neither viral videos of strange activities nor humorous student-made videos. They are thought-provoking views of today's reality. The 55 minutes and 58 seconds (55:58) of these six videos will change you.

The Machine Is Us/ing Us (Final Version) (4:33)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
The Machine Is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gR6VPVrpw
The first video is the classic "text is linear…" video showing how the Internet is changing all aspects of society, by Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Pay particular attention to the last thirty seconds when he lists things "to rethink." The second video is Wesch’s keynote talk from the Personal Democracy Forum in June 2009. He talks about his continuing efforts to "figure out where we are, where we might be going, and the possible downsides and dangers of new technologies so we can use the new technologies to serve human purposes." These are well worth the half-hour it takes to view them.

A Vision of Students Today (4:44)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
A Vision of K-12 Students Today (4:45)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A-ZVCjfWf8
The first video is another short and widely viewed video by Michael Wesch. He uses 200 of his students to show how things are different today—"how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime." The second video is identical in format and audio to Wesch's video, but uses K-12 students.

Are Kids Different Because of Digital Media? (2:34) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-PT3vEjw5g
Learning to Change—Changing to Learn (5:38)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tahTKdEUAPk
These videos offer quick suggestions about what must be done to effectively educate digital natives. The first video is from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative. The second is from the Consortium for School Networking (COSN).

---