Don Tapscott: "Net Generation"

In the first entry of this blog I have put forward my viewpoint regarding Mark Prensky's article about "Digital natives and Digital immigrants". I have read another author called Don Tapscott who also wrote and did research on the same topic presented, but with the minor difference that he uses another terminology: "The Net Generation" (Shortened to N-geners). I reckoned that it would be quite interesting to reflect upon some ideas that I've gathered from one of his most well-known articles called: "The rise of the Net generation".

I took an excerpt from the article that I considered worthwhile: “The Net generation are children at the heart of the new digital media culture, and whose learning styles and strategies have changed profoundly and dramatically from that of their parents”. I believe it is highly important for us to see that learning strategies and styles are no longer similar to that of former times; hence, we need to move away from the traditional teaching model to a more eclectic and inclusive one. Our learners are more demanding because the world we live in is fast-moving and insists on trends that are hard to crack.

 Furthermore, we should not fight back or resist the network fashion but we should adopt it and apply it to improve our lessons and to appeal students. That is why I think it is advantageous to obserb and be mindful about our children’s strategies to develop lessons that are more fruitful, content-rich, and that contemplate the new learning styles.

Another characteristic the author mentions, is that this new generations are exceptionally curious, self-reliant, smart, focused, able to adapt, high in self-esteem, and has a global orientation. Let alone the fact that the way they get hold of input data is utterly different, and their ability to multi-task has shaken everything known so far.

 This last fragment holds truth only partly, since it generalizes and one cannot take for granted that all kids will have these traits with no exception whatsoever. In the educational field, we encounter individuals of all kinds, some of them may embody the characteristics mentioned above, but some others won’t. This is the moment in which our role becomes important to help learners develop their learning skills, stimulate their intelligences and adjust our lessons to make the most out of their potential.

The “culture of interaction” is another topic tackled within this article, and I do agree with the author in that this generation has the strong necessity of exposing themselves, their passions and interests; it is the Internet the path that makes this urgency viable with only just "one click". This culture, if harnessed, can be a tremendous force in promoting learning.

"When these peoples surf the net, they typically participate in several activities at the same time.” This fragment reffers back to multi-tasking and I must say I have an ambiguous posture towards this topic. It is widely affirmed that this ability is aqcuired by new generations because of the way they access and digest information masively and overwhelmingly. However, it is also fair to say that this ability is somehow connected to maturational factors. Young learners have a more flexible schemata and they subsume information in a larger scale and with hardly any effort than older people, who do not have much "room" left in their shemas and their speed for processing data is fairly weaker. Two plausible theories for one topic, I guess it depends on how we want to see it.

“Another reality is that kids are not fond of pre-digested information, they want (and need) to learn by doing, where they check their own understanding trying things out! and this is how learning becomes experiential, and hence, meaningful and long-lasting.” When I read this passage form the article Brunner came to my mind immediately. We studied Brunner's ideas and theories in Psycholinguistics (a subject of our English teaching programme) and he coined the term "Scaffolding", by which adults or teachers (in our case) should guide the learner or child to discover things by himself. It is precisely this discovery that will have a meaningful outcome for the child and that experience is automatically engraved in his mind, resulting in a long-lasting learning. Having said that, we should consider devicing classroom activities based on problem-solving or simply tasks that pose a challenge to them and that they can resolve by trial and error.

These are some ideas that kept bouncing in my mind...

Hope you find them worthwhile.

Here's the link to the complete article if you feel like reading it!