The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s

SCUP members have shown themselves to be extremely interested, professionally, in generational differences in learning style. After all, if you are planning for the future of your campus, it's essential that it be ready to accommodate what the students bring with them, including the technology tools they use. And that's true not just for physical space, but for virtual space and functionalities as well.

In The New York Times, Brad Stone writes that his two-year old daughter calls his Kindle his "book," which gave him some pause. He's not even sold on the Kindle and she's going to grow up understanding that something like the Kindle is in fact a "book."

So, he looked around a bit and found what we at SCUP have been seeing: There are "mini-generation gaps" that are much smaller in terms of the years we traditionally think of as "generations."

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

We really have our jobs cut out for us, trying to be appropriately prepared for the communications and learning preferences of young people when those preferences can change with every 2-4-year cohort, not just every generation.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA