An Essay for Public Relations Class...

It’s interesting that teachers in classrooms everyday have to compete against everything available on a student’s phone, or in many cases, their personal laptops. How could the lecture or the PowerPoint in the front of the room be more interesting than Facebook, Twitter, AIM, text messages and everything else along those lines.


“Engagement” (whether it be in schoolwork or even online) is dwindling among the younger generation. A documentary called Frontline’s Digital World talked to students who said that when writing a paper they could only write one paragraph at a time. They write in “bursts and snippets.” Many support the idea that this has a direct correlation to the fact that they are “digital natives.” In the digital world, everything is truncated. Twitter updates, Facebook statuses, IMs and their short words like “lol” and “brb.” If they are writing in short ideas all day on the web, why wouldn’t they have a hard time writing a long idea like an essay?


In an article from guardian.co.uk called Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilizing’ the human mind, Lady Greenfield, a professor at Oxford and director of the Royal Institution, says “children’s experiences on social networking sites ‘are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21^st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to emphasize and a shaky sense of identity.’”

While many want to punish the students for their inability to concentrate on academics because their unimportant social networking is getting in the way, how can we? A pro-technology in the classroom principal from Frontline’s Digital World stated that kids will need to be fluent in technology and experts in communication because, “that’s the way the world is now.” Maybe the older generation should focus on catching up instead of criticizing?

In fact, they are. In an article from the New York Times this past October called Finding a Guide for Online Networking, Marc Prensky, author of Digital Game-Based Learning, explained that the older generation is “likely to be ‘digital immigrants’ who must learn the language and the culture of the Internet Age… ‘And your best cultural guide is younger person, a digital native, born into a world of computers, video games and instant messaging.’”


The documentary emphasized this as well, even stating that by the time the older generation researches and publishes information about technology, that technology is “obsolete.” The technological world is definitely a rapid growth that is continually developing, but it is also fascinating. Everyone wants to be a part of it, have their profile and presence on social networking sites and use the Internet to communicate with Skype and AIM. Even the older generation is intrigued while they are grumbling about students texting in class. But they can learn from the “boomers.” Prensky adds, “Smart immigrants have always relied on the younger generation to learn the language. Kids today are eager to help, because sharing information is part of their culture.”