Net Generation and Web 2.0 in Education

• Net Generation students are experienced multitaskers, accustomed to using text messaging, telephones, and e-mail while searching the Internet and watching television. They are ready for multimedia learning to be delivered on a flexible learning schedule, one that is not tied to a set time and place.
• While kids are not afraid to use innovative digital tools such as blogging and repurpose them for their own uses, adults are usually more cautious.
• Rather than appreciating the varied and often creative ways in which young people make use of new technologies, adults tend to be wary or even afraid of digital tools and seek to strengthen restrictions on their use in schools and libraries.
• Many schools have banned the use of blogging sites like LiveJournal and Xanga and social sharing and networking sites like MySpace and Friendster. While school restrictions regarding technology use are typically justified by the desire to enhance student safety and to remove distractions from student learning, such measures often aggravate rather than resolve complex problems arising from the new conditions of the digital era.
• Members of the Net Generation are connected and technologically savvy, and they see technology as an essential part of their lives.
• A major factor in the rapid growth of online activity is simply the desire to connect with others. Teenagers visit social networking sites and use communication tools to make friends, form social groups, and develop their personal identities. This behaviour is an expression of ordinary adolescent development and socialization. It is not all that different from the behaviour of adolescents in previous generations. What is different is that the ever stricter limits on teenagers’ physical space and the age-old desire of young people to escape adult supervision have pushed more teenage activities online and out of the physical world.
• In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, kids would run and bike all over the neighbourhood with their friends, and teenagers would hang out at local hamburger joints, drive-ins, or, eventually, shopping malls. Now that some malls are banning teenagers without adult supervision and parents are less likely to allow their children to be unsupervised in public spaces, the next logical step for teenagers is to go online and hang out in a virtual environment.  
• For teenagers, the digital media that schools and parents too often see as dangerous are essential avenues for expression and socialization. In many respects, rewritten the rules of socialization. Whereas teenagers in the past would focus primarily on their physical appearance and behaviour, many of them are now more preoccupied with creating digital profiles and learning how to present themselves online.
• The rules regulating peer pressure have changed as well. The result is that many teenagers now spend time in a world that is both real and virtual, and adults generally misunderstand the relationship between the two in the lives of adolescents.
• We have entered an era in which this technology is fundamentally changing our culture and impacting every aspect of our lives, including education.
• While they want to learn to use basic technology and acquire research skills, students also report that they want challenging, meaningful, and interactive instructional activities. Unfortunately, increasing numbers of students at the high school and college levels are becoming less satisfied with their teachers’ use of technology because educators are not using the tools with which students are most familiar, even as a greater and more complex use of technology is expected of students in their future careers.
• Outside of school, kids are digitally connected to a world full of information, a world in which it is important to know how to find, analyze, and synthesize information, discover solutions, and create new knowledge.
• Kids need to learn when it is appropriate to network for socialization purposes and when to use social sharing tools for purposes of learning or work. While parents certainly bear their own responsibility in this regard, schools should play their part by recognizing and incorporating such social networking tools as valuable learning resources.
• A re-evaluation of learning in areas of engagement, individualization, and collaboration. Educational Technology.) Rethinking teaching and learning should move education away from conventional methods by which kids are told what to learn, when, where, and how. Instead, knowledge should be actively constructed and students should be made responsible for their own learning. The digital age has added new dimensions to learning with newly desirable skills, primarily the ability to connect, collaborate, and network.
• Kids tend to be early adopters of new technologies while adults are often tentative because currently available digital tools were not part of the world in which they grew up. Yet we cannot expect to understand what our kids are doing online or expect them to learn how to be ethical and safe Internet users if we do not set the example. Adults need to learn as much as they can about new online tools such as blogs, wikis, and podcasting and how they can be effectively used for teaching and learning.
• To take blogs as one example, useful resources include Andy Carvin’s Learning.now, Vicki Davis’ Cool Cat Teacher, Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity, and Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed.
• The curriculum should be stripped of outdated and irrelevant content and replaced by a model of learning that recognizes that virtually any information can be accessed and manipulated anywhere, anytime, and by anyone.
• We must forget the idea that we know much more than our students do, but embrace the idea that they also know much more than we do. When we renounce our own exclusive status as experts, placing our students in the role of teachers and ourselves in the role of students, not only do we model for them the benefits of life-long learning, but we allow them to experience firsthand what every seasoned teacher already knows: If you really want to master a subject, teach it.