The NetGens 2.0: Clouds on the Horizon

We've been following the work of Malcolm Brown, from Dartmouth College, for a decade or more. He always finds some insightful stuff to learn from just about anything. His latest shares a shift he has noticed in just the last 3-5 years, suggesting to him that we are past "Net Generation 1.0" and already into Net Generation 2.0:

For daughter #1, getting a laptop for college was a big deal. She had been using desktop computers for years, of course, but the combination of starting college and getting a laptop was an enabling rite of passage. For daughter #2, the laptop was more like socks, sweaters, and shoes. She’d been using a laptop throughout high school, so she simply packed her laptop along with all the other essentials. No big deal.

An additional marker of change was the use of e-mail and Skype. Daughter #1 had used her college’s e-mail system. Daughter #2, who has been using Gmail for some time, never really gave a thought to using the campus e-mail system. In addition, daughter #2 has moved beyond her cell phone and is using Skype for many of her communications. This shift in my two daughters’ IT outfittings is mirrored by students at Dartmouth. Four years ago, when Dartmouth contemplated giving up its quaint but antiquated home-grown e-mail system (called BlitzMail), it was the students who protested the loudest. For those NetGens, life without BlitzMail was unthinkable. Today, with Dartmouth going through the same exercise, the majority of students welcome an upgrade. Many, perhaps most, don’t even use BlitzMail, preferring Gmail, Facebook, or some other hosted service they’ve been using for years.

Something has shifted. Perhaps one way to delineate this shift of the past four years is to say that students have moved from being the “NetGens 1.0” to being the “NetGens 2.0.

'Millennial' or 'Net Generation' Students and Their Impact on the Development of Student-Centered Facilities

This is the first of two themed issues of SCUP's journal that examine both the evolving student and the changing learning and living experience. This first issue focuses on key questions surrounding today's students: What do we know about them? What can we observe in their lifestyle and learning tendencies that would have an impact on learning experience design perspective? In the second issue, we will investigate how higher education institutions are responding to these changes. . . . To accomplish this purpose, we strive first to create a broad understanding of this context of change. We then explore the changes in programs, physical facilities, and environment that have and are being planned in response to these trends.

Read the full article here. Then use this blog's capability to comment or share additional, related resources. Thanks.

From the October–November–December 2008 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the focus of the article, 'Millennial' or 'Net Generation' Students and Their Impact on the Development of Student-Centered Facilities, v37n1, pp. 5-6, by John A. Ruffo. You can read the entire article here. It is an introduction, by Guest Editor John Ruffo, to the overall concept of this two-part, themed issue of Planning.

Note that this issue of Planning is the first of a two-part themed volume with the overall title, Student Life. The second part will be published in January 2009. Assembled, the two parts will be available in late January 2009 for purchase as a single PDF document for your quick and easy reference.

Why Professor Johnny Can't Read: Understanding the Net Generation's Texts

From Mark Mabrito and Tebecca Medley, in innovate: journal of online education, comes this more academic and thoughtful version of the cyclic news item about how differently some of the youngsters are communicating:

One way of better understanding Net-Generation learners is to examine the texts they create on online social networking, blogging, and image sites as well as in virtual worlds. Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley explore the nature of Net-Generation texts as a reflection of the cognitive differences between this generation's students and their older instructors, discuss the unique challenges this group of learners may present for instructors who do not share their technological immersion, and suggest the means by which such challenges may be overcome. To accommodate the needs of the Net Generation, Mabrito and Medley suggest that faculty must reconsider traditional pedagogy and integrate more innovative ways of instruction for this significantly different population of students.