Archive of ‘digital immigrants’ category

Mark Prensky on new education plan

To RSVP ahead of time, or to jump straight in at 2 pm EDT this Thursday, click here:
https://shindig.com/login/event/ftf-prensky

On Thursday, February 21st, from 2-3 pm EST, we’ll be joined by Marc Prensky, creator of “Civilization-level Alternative Education.”

Coiner of the term “Digital Native” and author of seven books and over 100 essays, Marc has spoken in over 40 countries, and his writings have been translated into a dozen languages.  He currently promotes a new civilization-level alternative in global education, championing an emerging new “Real-World-Impact Education” paradigm that more directly benefits students and the world in which they live.

Previously in his career Marc taught French, mathematics and music and headed an alternative school in New York City, worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group (and was its first Product Development Director), and founded and ran a computer game company. Marc holds an MBA degree from Harvard, with distinction, and a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Yale.

his new education plan would work in practice.  What would it take to get there from here?

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more on Future Trends in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=future+trends

no Millennials Gen Z Gen X

Can We Please Stop Talking About Generations as if They Are a Thing?

Millennials are not all narcissists and boomers are not inherently selfish. The research on generations is flawed.
DAVID COSTANZA
APRIL 13, 2018 9:00 AM

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SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN, 2008. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Generational-Myth/32491 Generational Myth
My note: Siva raised this issue from a sociologist point of view as soon as in 2008. Before him, Prensky’s “digitally natives” ideas was already criticized.
Howe and Strauss; Millennials books contributed to the overgeneralizations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
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We spend a lot of time debating the characteristics of generations—are baby boomers really selfish and entitledare millennials really narcissists, and the latest, has the next generation (whatever it is going to be called) already been ruined by cellphones? Many academics—and many consultants—argue that generations are distinct and that organizations, educators, and even parents need to accommodate them. These classifications are often met with resistance from those they supposedly represent, as most people dislike being represented by overgeneralizations, and these disputes only fuel the debate around this contentious topic.

In short, the science shows that generations are not a thing.

It is important to be clear what not a thing means. It does not mean that people today are the same as people 80 years ago or that anything else is static. Times change and so do people. However, the idea that distinct generations capture and represent these changes is unsupported.

What is a generation? Those who promote the concept define it as a group of people who are roughly the same age and who were influenced by a set of significant events. These experiences supposedly create commonalities, making those in the group more similar to each other and more different from other groups now and from groups of the same age in the past.

In line with the definition, there is a commonly held perception that people growing up around the same time and in the same place must have some sort of universally shared set of experiences and characteristics. It helps that the idea of generations intuitively makes sense. But the science does not support it. In fact, most of the research findings showing distinct generations are explained by other causes, have serious scientific flaws, or both.

For example, millennials score lower on job satisfaction than Gen Xers, but are millennials really a less satisfied generation? Early in their careers, Xers were also less satisfied than baby boomers.

Numerous booksarticles, and pundits have claimed that millennials are much more narcissistic than young people in the past.
on average, millennials are no more narcissistic now than Xers or boomers were when they were in their 20s, and one study has even found they might be less so than generations past. While millennials today may be more narcissistic than Xers or boomers are today, that is because young people are pretty narcissistic regardless of when they are young. This too is an age effect.

Final example. Research shows that millennials joining the Army now show more pride in their service than boomers or Xers did when they joined 20-plus years ago. Is this a generational effect? Nope. Everyone in the military now shows more pride on average than 20 years ago because of 9/11. The terrorist attack increased military pride across the board. This is known as a period effect and it doesn’t have anything to do with generations.

Another problem—identifying true generational effects is methodologically very hard. The only way to do it would be to collect data from multiple longitudinal panels. Individuals in the first panel would be measured at the start of the study and then in subsequent years with new panels added every year thereafter, allowing assessment of whether people were changing because they were getting older (age effects), because of what was happening around them (period effects), or because of their generation (cohort effects). Unfortunately, such data sets pretty much do not exist. Thus, we’re never really able to determine why a change occurred.

According to one national-culture model, people from the United States are, on average, relatively individualistic, indulgent, and uncomfortable with hierarchical order.
My note: RIchard Nisbett sides with Hofstede and Minkov: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/06/14/cultural-differences/
Conversely, people from China are generally group-oriented, restrained, and comfortable with hierarchy. However, these countries are so large and diverse that they each have millions of individuals who are more similar to the “averages” of the other country than to their own.

Given these design and data issues, it is not surprising that researchers have tried a variety of different statistical techniques to massage (aka torture) the data in an attempt to find generational differences. Studies showing generational differences have used statistical techniques like analysis of variance (ANOVA) and cross-temporal meta-analysis (CTMA), neither of which is capable of actually attributing the differences to generations.

The statistical challenge derives from the problem we have already raised—generations (i.e., cohorts) are defined by age and period. As such, mathematically separating age, period, and cohort effects is very difficult because they are inherently confounded with one another. Their linear dependency creates what is known as an identification problem, and unless one has access to multiple longitudinal panels like I described above, it is impossible to statistically isolate the unique effect of any one factor.

First, relying on flawed generational science leads to poor advice and bad decisions. An analogy: Women live longer than men, on average. Why? They engage in fewer risky behaviors, take better care of themselves, and have two X chromosomes, giving them backups in case of mutations. But if you are a man and you go to the doctor and ask how to live longer, she doesn’t tell you, “Be a woman.” She says eat better, exercise, and don’t do stupid stuff. Knowing the why guides the recommendation.

Now imagine you are a manager trying to retain your supposedly job-hopping, commitment-averse millennial employees and you know that Xers and boomers are less likely to leave their jobs. If you are that manager, you wouldn’t tell your millennial employees to “be a boomer” or “grow older” (nor would you decide to hire boomers or Xers rather than millennials—remember that individuals vary within populations). Instead, you should focus on addressing benefits, work conditions, and other factors that are reasons for leaving.

Second, this focus on generational distinctions wastes resources. Take the millennials-as-commitment-averse-job-hoppers stereotype. Based on this belief, consultants sell businesses on how to recruit and retain this mercurial generation. But are all (or even most) millennials job-hopping commitment avoiders? Survey research shows that millennials and Xers at the same point in their careers are equally likely to stay with their current employer for five or more years (22 percent v. 21.8 percent). It makes no sense for organizations to spend time and money changing HR policies when employees are just as likely to stick around today as they were 15 years ago.

Third, generations perpetuate stereotyping. Ask millennials if they are narcissistic job-hoppers and most of them will rightly be offended. Treat boomers like materialistic achievement seekers and see how it affects their work quality and commitment. We finally are starting to recognize that those within any specific group of people are varied individuals, and we should remember those same principles in this context too. We are (mostly) past it being acceptable to stereotype and discriminate against women, minorities, and the disabled. Why is it OK to do so to millennials or boomers?

The solutions are fairly straightforward, albeit challenging, to implement. To start, we need to focus on the why when talking about whether groups of people differ. The reasons why any generation should be different have only been generally discussed, and the theoretical mechanism that supposedly creates generations has not been fully fleshed out.

Next, we need to quit using these nonsensical generations labels, because they don’t mean anything. The start and end years are somewhat arbitrary anyway. The original conceptualization of social generations started with a biological generational interval of about 20 years, which historians, sociologists and demographers (for one example, see Strauss and Howe, 1991) then retrofitted with various significant historical events that defined the period.

The problem with this is twofold. First, such events do not occur in nice, neat 20-year intervals. Second, not everyone agrees on what the key events were for each generation, so the start and end dates also move around depending on what people think they were. One review found that start and end dates for boomers, Xers, and millennials varied by as many as nine years, and often four to five, depending on the study and the researcher. As with the statistical problem, how can distinct generations be a thing if simply defining when they start and when they end varies so much from study to study?

In the end, the core scientific problem is that the pop press, consultants, and even some academics who are committed to generations don’t focus on the whys. They have a vested interest in selling the whats (Generation Me has reportedly sold more than 115,000 copies, and Google “generations consultants” and see how many firms are dedicated to promulgating these distinctions), but without the science behind them, any prescriptions are worthless or even harmful

David Costanza is an associate professor of organizational sciences at George Washington University and a senior consortium fellow for the U.S. Army Research Institute. He researches, teaches, and consults in the areas of generations, leadership, culture, and organizational performance.

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more on the topic in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=millennials

Teenagers, The Internet, And Privacy

The Truth About Teenagers, The Internet, And Privacy

http://www.fastcompany.com/3037962/then-and-now/the-truth-about-teenagers-the-internet-and-privacy

danah boyd, a professor at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, argues that teenagers closely scrutinize what they share online because it is a way for them to negotiate their changing identities. In her book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, she describes how teenagers carefully curate their feeds based on the audience they are trying to reach.

Adolescents have been migrating away from Facebook and Twitter over the last few years, showing preference for sites like Snapchat, Whisper, Kik, and Secret that provide more anonymity and privacy. Part of this transition can be explained by the fact that the older social media sites stopped being cool when parents joined them, but perhaps another reason could be that teenagers growing up in the post-Snowden era implicitly understand the value of anonymity. For teens, it’s not a matter of which platform to use, but rather which works best in a particular context.

The Four Stages of Moving from Traditional to Online Teaching

The Four Stages of Moving from Traditional to Online Teaching

http://www.getfueled.com/blog/2014-09-09/four-stages-moving-traditional-online-teaching#sthash.7FSmEhEv.dpuf

1.      Sage on the Stage:

In this stage the teacher takes on traditional lecture-style teaching and hasn’t yet implemented any online or blended learning strategies.

2.      Stranger in a Strange Land:

Next, the teacher becomes a Stranger in a Strange Land, as instruction moves to the computer, and the computer becomes the primary instructional tool. At this stage, the teacher is still unsure of how they fit in but is experimenting with and utilizing online tools to enhance instruction.

3.      Resource:

As the teacher continues to evolve, they enter the Resource stage, and while the computer is still the primary instructional tool, the teacher is comfortable being a resource, answering questions and re-teaching when asked.

4.      Facilitator and Initiator of Interventions:

Do Digital Natives Really Exist?

Do Digital Natives Really Exist?

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/do-digital-natives-really-exist/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29

it’s an accurate depiction of the current generation of students? No one is born with knowledge. Everything is learned through environment and practice, so maybe it’s time to reexamine long held assumptions about students’ relationships to technology.