This is my new favourite report, even though it was published last year. I like it because the authors, Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, have solid opinions — informed by their own research — on how schools must engage with the learning needs of the Net Generation.
Green and Hannon insist that we must stop focusing so heavily on the hardware and instead start responding to the users: in other words, we need to build on what we know is already working with students, and we need to “develop strategies to bridge formal and informal learning” (p. 17), the latter of which is characterised in this context by self-motivation, ownership, purpose, and peer-to-peer learning (pp. 46-47). For Green and Hannon, it’s all about relationships and networks and not about PCs, which leads them to demand that we identify access to knowledge rather than access to hardware as characterising the new digital divide (p. 17, 59-60).
That’s the guts of what they’re saying, anyway. Here are some of the more specific points they make.
- The Net Gen use new media for strengthening existing relationships, rather than for creating new networks (p. 10). (The Never ending friending research found the same.)
- They are capable of self-regulation when kept well-informed about risks (p. 10)
- Debates around moral panic and technological determinism contrast with how Net Gen view and use technologies (p. 15).
- These technologies are used to facilitate already recognisable social interactions — nothing particularly new or crazy (p. 16).
- The internet provides a forum for creativity and expression — just as decorating your bedroom was an expression of the same for previous generations (p. 19). The difference is that the creations of the Net Gen are being shared with a worldwide audience (p. 19).
- There needs to be a focus on ‘soft skills’ rather than specific areas of knowledge (pp. 22-23). We need to be able to teach students initiative, intelligence, creativity, problem-solving … and we should lay off promoting the “false disctinction” (p. 24) between knowledge and skills.
- We must stop trying to figure out how children should be learning from technology; instead, we should seek to learn from their existing practices (p. 25). We need to tap into the students themselves as a resource, rather than thinking about what new resources can be added (pp 25-26).
- Young people are often concerned about the “unmanageable scale” of the Web and they find it difficult to evaluate and prioritise their search results (p. 68).
And here are some interesting stats:
- Few seem to value soft skills. Young people rank creativity fairly low: only eighth most important skill for the future (p. 27).
- Only 50% of parents selected ‘classroom lessons’ as the most important method of learning for their child (p. 30).
Bob Pletka’s book Educating the Net Generation discusses some of the reasons for why young people these days are feeling disengaged from school. The context is American, but much of what Pletka says about young people’s culture resonates with Australia. According to Pletka, the environment of the ‘Net Geners’ is:
