A Glimpse at the Students of Today

Prepared by Dena Faust for USDLA conference 2008

“Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”

_Marc Prensky, 2001

Marc Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

So, who are these students?

They are the Millennials

They are the Net Generation

They are the Digital Natives

Why do we call them digital natives?

By the time students enter college today, they will have spent …

Over 10,000 hours playing video games

Prensky, M (2001). Digital natives digital immigrants

Over 10,000 hours using a cell phone

Prensky, M (2001). Digital natives digital immigrants

20,000 hours watching TV

Prensky, M (2001). Digital natives digital immigrants

and will have sent over 200,000 emails and IMs by the time they graduate

college

Prensky, M (2001). Digital natives digital immigrants

They have never had to …

Dial a phone

Play a Record

Or get up to change the TV channel

Sadly Kermit is old enough to have been their father.

These teens were born into a digital world where they expect to be able to create,

consume, remix, and share material

Lee Rain, Director Pew Internet and American Life Project

For the common Net Gener:

Computers aren’t technologyThe Internet is better than TVReality is no longer realDoing is more important than knowingMultitasking is a way of lifeStaying connected is essentialThere is no tolerance for delaysConsumer and creator are blurred

Jason Frand, The Information Age Mindset: Changes in Students and Implications for Higher Education,” EDUCAUSE Review 35, no.5 (September/October 2000): 15-24

Staying connected is essential

Are you helping them stay connected?

Is your learning environment providing a place for this type of interactivity?

These are the technologies they use everyday.

Why not use the tools that they are already using to engage and teach them?

The fact is that even if you are the most engaging old-style teacher in the world,you are not going to capture most of our students’ attention the old way. “

- Prensky 2005

Prensky, Marc 2005 Engage me or enrage me: What today's learners demand

“Engage me or enrage me.”

Prensky, Marc 2005 Engage me or enrage me: What today's learners demand

Your students may be sending SUBTLE messages all around the classroom

Our digital immigrant instructors, who speak a language of the pre-digital age, are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.

__Prensky, 2001

Marc Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

References• Oblinger, Diana (2003). Boomers Gen-Xers & Millennials: Understanding the new students. EDUCAUSE

Review, July/August 2003, 37-47.

• Neil Howe and William Strauss, Millennials rising (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).

• Prensky, Marc“ Digital natives, digital immigrants, Part II: Do they really think differently? "On the Horizon,

vol. 9, no. 6 (December 2001), pp. 15–24; available from http://marcprensky.com/writing.

• Jones, Steve "The internet goes to college: How students are living in the future with today's technology"

(Washington, D.C.: Pew Internet & American Life Project, September 15, 2002),

http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=71.

• Oblinger, Diana and Oblinger, James L, Educating the net generation (Educause, 2005).

• Prensky, Marc (2005). Engage me or enrage me: What today's learners demand [Electronic version].

EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2005, 61-63.

• “Where We Begin” provided by Kathy Reynolds under the Creative Commons license. More of this artist’s

music can be found at http://www.podsafeaudio.com/.