THE BIG SHIFT

The following is the opening to a paper I wrote about the Next Level of education for the new generation. Your thoughts?

THE BIG SHIFT

Push-down gets Push-back

Online learning isn’t just changing, it is transmogrifying - turning into another beast altogether. We’ve spent the last 10 years making curriculum more easily accessed by the Internet, worked on defining and creating quality online courses, created, captured and catalogued learning objects, but never anticipated the BIG SHIFT away from push-down education, information and even entertainment. Courses packaged by faculty as well as packaged television and radio programs are increasingly losing relevance to a new world of collaborative creation, configuration, and viral distribution. Information, entertainment, and education are being dynamically created by its users, and/or altered, configured, and shared through viral electronic communication processes. Today there are more viewers and creators of video on the Internet, than there are in the television industry. Audiences for traditional movies and TV are declining, while gaming, individual- produced video and personal radio stations are increasing. The “wiki” phenomenon such as the wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com), a user-created encyclopedia online to which anyone can contribute, now boasts a more comprehensive, up to date and factual encyclopedia than the traditionally published sets. It’s time for education to look at these trends and respond to the shift.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Education has a front-row opportunity to participate in this big shift, because our classrooms are filled with its leaders - students who have grown up with digital technology and are thereforee “native speakers” of the computer, video game, cell phone, Internet language. The sheer volume of their interaction with the technology means that today’s students are thinking and processing information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. They are “digital natives” being taught by “digital immigrants”. (Marc Prensky, On the Horizon NCB University Press, Vol 9 No. 5, October 2001) Digital immigrants are those of us who came to digitization later in life, and speak it with an “accent”. We immigrants still use terms like “dial a phone” or “record album” to the amusement, or eye-rolling aside of the digital native. Higher education needs to capitalize on their native speakers as a resource to help us re-shape 21st and even 22nd Century education.

Mobile Learning (M-Learning)

The natives are on the phone, mobile phone that is. The mobile phone is the most popular youth technology product with almost universal adoption regardless of gender or culture. In many developed markets such as Japan and Europe, mobile ownership is saturated with around 80% of all under 25’s owning a mobile phone. For companies in these markets, future revenue growth comes from creating relevant content and services for their lifestyles rather than evolving feature- led technology.

In growth markets such as the US, youth adoption of mobile phones is accelerating. Youth mobile owners in the US numbered 44.9 million in 2004, and are expected to rise to 52.2 million in 2006 (Wireless World Forum mobileYouth® 2004). A recent survey by the Yankee Group showed 55% of children aged 13-17 have cell phones, up from about a third in 2003. Approximately 25% of children between eight and 12 now have cell phones (Wall Street Journal Sunday, August 21, 2005.)

It’s not just phones that signal a mobile revolution. Wherever one looks, the evidence of mobile penetration and adoption is irrefutable: cell phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), MP3 players, portable game devices, handhelds, tablets, and laptops abound. No demographic is immune from this phenomenon. From toddlers to seniors, people are increasingly connected and are digitally communicating with each other in ways that would have been impossible to imagine only a few years ago (Enabling Mobile Learning, Ellen Wagner, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 3 (May/June 2005): 40–53.)

Democratization, Participation, Group Influence

More than the technology itself, the ability for people to participate in the creation of content for the digital space is one of the more compelling changes in our cultural and educational milieu. "What's hard to measure, and what we're trying to measure …is the impact of groupthink, of group mentality, and the tendency of what we might call the democratization of social interaction and how that changes this generation's relationship with almost everything they come in contact with." (A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target New York Times, January 22, 2006)

The ability to allow creation of product from the ground up is the next biggest challenge for higher education institutions and their faculty. Websites like YouTube where users post their homemade videos, and RSS feeds that allow users to create their own radio stations or become a DJ for others on the web mean our students will be looking for similar creative, group participation opportunities when they are in school. For many, our present schools have become places where they feel they must “power down, and disconnect”, (words of an 18-year old friend), an alarming technological analogy for many students’ lack of engagement in traditional classroom events, and the classroom’s lack of engagement with them.