There is No Millennium Generation

Recently, a New York Times technology article devoted to venture capitalists use of the younger generation for their market research remarked:

And people now in junior high and high school have spent their lives with technology. “This is the first generation for whom the computer is a native language,” said Jim Gauer, managing director of Palomar Ventures, a Los Angeles firm. “We’re all going to have to get re-educated and learn that language.”

In a similar vein, a recent video on teachertube.com, “Pay Attention,” hyped the same message with a barrage of statistics. Students will have logged x (where x is a very large integer) hours playing video games, read x number of emails, and IMed x number of messages. The message was simple: contemporary students were the digital generation, and teachers better get with program and plan a lesson around a cellphone.

Where are these students? Who has them in class? The digital generation strikes me as the most unexamined assumption in contemporary business and education culture. I teach at a metro university in a relatively affluent area of the US. One would expect that my students would be representative of the “raised-by-computers” generation. They are not. I'd estimate that over the past five years, only 15 percent, at most, of any of my classes has been computer/information literate. True, most can do word processing, manage email, download music and images, and IM—but not very well. Beyond these basics, their skill set is pretty minimal. The digital generation, with few exceptions, does not exist.

No one is born digital and only a few are raised digital. And absolutely one has “the computer as a native language.” And who do these marketers think is teaching the rest how to become digital? I'm reminded of the fundamental scientific and computing advances made during the Cold War. It was not the Sputnik generation who made them—those raised on science enriched high school programs—but the previous generation.

Comments

[amo]

Just a couple of weeks ago at Computers in Libraries, folks from U. Guelph presented data that back you up. A colleague of mine said that it is "the hippies all over again. A small minority are being depicted as the cultural majority."

[fghhfffffffffffffff]

Sometimes I really hate my computer.

[Pablo]

I have three kids: 12, 9, 5 and we have three laptops and 2 desktops. Must of the time they are watching tv, playing video games and surfing the internet at the same time; without mentioning the cell phone that has five hundred features...I do believe that the amount of technology available for the average household will be influencing this generation in many ways (both +s and -s) and probably we (previous generations) haven't understand what the future will be...

[kellyinkansas]

You're absolutely right, Paula! Our students love the digital tools but don't necessarily know how to manipulate them or push them out of their social lives and into their school or work lives.

An unexamined tenet is are we really more effective communicators when we're busy with our cell phone or Blackberry instead of interacting with our FULL attention with the people/co-workers right in front of us.

There's at least somewhat of an assumption that the "technology" will do it for me rather than the technology providing a richer experience - ie "I'll take a result off the first page of Google for my paper rather than exploring several pages of Google sources that would take weeks or months if done in a library - if a book-filled library was even close by to the student.

We still have a great deal to learn about educating the digital nation!