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Tom McBride, one of my favorite English professors from Beloit College (he could teach Shakespeare like no one else), compiles a “Beloit College Mindset List” each year for his colleagues to help them understand the incoming class and how their culture differs from the professors who teach them. The 2 million students who started college this fall were generally born in 1990. (Oh dear, that’s the year AFTER I graduated from Beloit.)
Some points that stand out to me:
GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
Authorities have always been building a wall on the Mexican border.
Caller ID has always been available on phones.
There have always been charter schools.
Students always had Goosebumps.
Bob Moore of Blue Valley Schools in Kansas took the Mindset list a step further in this blog post: Class of 2020. He writes about his own mindset list and the mindset of students entering his school district this year who will become the class of 2020.
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According to Marc Prensky, Digital Natives have a different way of “speaking”. They want information fast, they prefer graphics before text, and they prefer random access to linear access. Most discussion boards are based on threaded text displayed in a hierarchy. The discussion is quickly diverted from the original poster’s question to the last person’s comment. A few people who are frequent posters can dominate where less frequent posters are left behind in the conversation.
VoiceThread offers a real alternative to traditional discussion boards by doing away with the hierarchy of comments. The original image is in the center of the screen with the original poster’s comment on the top left. New comments appear as small boxes that begin to encircle the center. You can quickly see who has responded and click the responses that interest you, then add your comment.
It will be interesting to see if other systems adopt this style over the hierarchical threads that dominate online conversations today. This provides a more social and customizable experience, because each user can decide which comments to view.
