idle chatting and posting, but a means to eliminate the barriers of distance and language that stand between people and knowledge. Friends can be sitting a few desks away in the same classroom, or they can be anywhere else around the world. We have personally witnessed students in classrooms partnering with peers from around the globe on group learning projects.
For the digital generations, there is no practical difference between the lives they live in the physical world and the lives they live while online (Palfrey & Gasser, 2010). It’s all part of the same tapestry. They live in a physical world and have normal face-to-face relationships, but they also participate in a digital online culture where they have virtual relationships that augment face-to-face interactions, as well as virtual relationships that take place completely in the online world. The digital generations are as comfortable with online relationships as they are with face-to-face relationships.
How Technology Affects the Way Students Learn
Anyone who works with students in the digital generations is aware that there is something different about the way they learn. There is sound empirical research that confirms that these young people are cognitively different from older generations. A number of books, including Growing Up Digital (Tapscott, 2000), Grown Up Digital (Tapscott, 2008), Born Digital (Palfrey & Gasser, 2016), Understanding the Digital Generation (Jukes, McCain, & Crockett, 2010), and Rewired (Rosen, 2010), are telling us that the fast-paced bombardment of text, color, images, and sound that young people experience in the digital online world from a very young age alters the way their brains process information. Twenty-first century students are using different parts of their brains to process information than their parents and teachers. They are visual learners. In addition, information on the internet is often broken into bite-sized chunks to make it quicker and easier to consume. Ted observes that a steady diet of these information nuggets has led to a much shorter attention span in modern digital students. Further, social networking has created an online environment where learning is often a very social experience. Add all of this up, and you see that the digital generations are actually thinking and learning differently than previous generations. It is important for parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians to recognize that modern students have a much different way of learning than adults raised in a nondigital world.
The following list of some of the major attributes and expectations we observe in digital students puts this into perspective.
• They use technology as an essential tool to connect to their culture; using mobile, internet-connected devices like cell phones is not optional for the digital generations.
• They expect immediate access to up-to-date information whenever they need it.
• They are used to immediate feedback (from video games and online experiences).
• They read text only as a last resort and usually receive information in visual, auditory, or multimedia formats.
• They expect to be connected to friends all the time, with relationships and collaborations that comprise a mix of online and face-to-face interactions.
• They turn to online sources to learn new skills or acquire new information and expect those services to tailor themselves to their individual wants and needs.
• They have a much more open concept of privacy and are more comfortable with intelligent, autonomous technology than generations raised in the 20th century.
• They multitask on several simultaneous online interactions while they go about daily tasks.
The students entering schools present the adults who are in control of the school system with a significant problem—many adults can’t relate to the world of the digital generations. We have witnessed in many schools, school districts, and states and provinces that neither teachers, administrators, parents, school district staff, school board members, people at the department of education, nor state or provincial politicians raised in the 20th century have any real long-term exposure to the technologically infused life experience of the students who populate our schools. There are, of course, younger teachers entering the teaching profession that have grown up in the modern, networked, digital environment, and these new colleagues bring hope for the future as they work their way into the ranks of teachers, administrators, and school district staff. However, we will not feel their most significant impacts on schooling for some time.
The core truth is that the majority of the adults responsible for teaching young people are out of touch with their students. This is a huge issue of relevancy for education. Unless teachers make it a priority to understand the world their students experience outside school, the instructional methods and examples that teachers use are almost certain to miss the mark. We believe this is a huge impediment to effective communication and to engaging learning, but we do offer solutions in the following sections to help bridge this gap.
Focus on Individuals
We have many years of research that tell us what really works and what doesn’t work in terms of maximizing learning in young minds (Battro, Fischer, & Léna, 2008; Tokuhama-Espinosa, 2010). This research invalidates many of the assumptions that constitute the assembly-line foundation for how we organize most schools. The cognitive development of human beings simply does not fit into nice, neat organizational structures. Although these assumptions might have made sense from a business perspective, from a human-instruction perspective, organizational structures like grades designated by age and classrooms filled with twenty-five to thirty students for mass instruction are counterproductive at best and boring, oppressive, and damaging to individual students at worst. Trying to apply production-efficiency strategies to schools may produce efficient organizational structures, but it doesn’t create an instructional environment that can handle the wide range of unique individuals that policy mandates schools teach.
In his book Brain Rules, John Medina (2014) writes about the disconnect between how the brains of students develop and the way schools are organized:
The current system is founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Yet there is no reason to suspect that the brain pays attention to those expectations. Students at the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability. These differences can profoundly influence classroom performance. This has been tested…. Lockstep models based simply on age are guaranteed to create a counterproductive mismatch to brain biology. (p. 67)
However, despite Medina’s (2014) and other brain researchers’ work to identify its flaws, a lockstep model for organizing schools is what we continue to have in education (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Jensen, 2005; Sousa, 2011). The question is, if we are not going to organize schools around grades and classrooms, then what should take their place? Listen again to what Medina’s (2014) research has to say on this subject:
You cannot change the fact that the human brain is individually wired. Every student’s brain … is wired differently. That’s the brain rule. You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education chooses the latter, to our detriment. It needs to be torn down and newly envisioned … in a commitment to individualizing instruction. (p. 51)
What Medina (2014) is saying here is incredibly important. We should design schools to enable individualized instruction that meets each student’s unique needs. At this point, we should note that educators have wanted to create individualized instruction for a long time, but the logistics of making that happen in the school system prevented large-scale individualized instruction.
Fortunately, technology excels at providing tools for customizing services for individuals. Consider the way 21st century businesses can target individuals with goods and services tailored to their personal needs then reflect on how
