Fostering Criticality for the iGeneration

The iGenerationIn 1991 Canadian writer Douglas Coupland both identified a generation and noted its most salient features in his novel entitled Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (Coupland, 1991). What Coupland recognised over 20 years ago was that the incipient growth of the new media led by the world wide web and the internet (amongst other things including 'old technologies' such as the prevalence of television and MTV videos) was changing the way the postbaby boom generation were engaging with the world, society and the self, often without clear sign-posts that would help them to navigate this Brave New World. Looking back on that novel and some of its prognoses about how this Generation X was being affected by that world into which they were born, it all seems rather quaint, though in many ways prescient.To this day we sometimes speak of Generation X as natives within the millennial moment of accelerated information technology, whereas many teachers and school administrators are rightly termed immigrants. When did we first start using email? When did we first browse the internet? For us (and for most readers of this paper, we assume) it was circa 1995, now 17 years ago.Tellingly, this is the average age of the students in our senior classrooms. It may seem like a millennium away itself, but the internet and all its attendant spin-off technologies and applications is no more than an adolescent itself; awkwardly groping towards maturity. Though perhaps 'groping' implies a more measured search for meaning and purpose that doesn't quite catch the head-long rush into an uncharted future that this technology is propelling us towards.Statistics and figures related to the acceleration of digital data are mindboggling. Eric Schmidt of Google recently noted that 'there is now more data produced in two days, than all the data that had been produced in the entire history of civilisation since its dawning up until 2003.' According to numerous websites, 290 billion email messages are sent every day, and more than 80% of them are simply spam.Interesting facts, yet how do we know they are true? How can we be sure that these figures are correct? Why do these quotations come without a name-date reference? The answer is obvious: we got it from the internet. Google was our guide...The internet is about the age of the generation we might now identify as the iGeneration: a generation growing up with the omnipresence of the world wide web and the instant information and entertainment gratification it provides. Their ways of engaging with the world are, in many instances, mediated as virtual experiences. Members of the iGeneration are far better skilled at using information technology than their parents and teachers. They have iPads, iPods and iPhones; they download free music, free films and free school assignments without being overly concerned about intellectual property rights, plagiarism and appropriate referencing, concepts that are not part of the iGeneration's intellectual vocabulary.They build a social network by befriending and 'defriending' with the simple click of a mouse. For many of them, the internet has become their first and often only source of information, bypassing more traditional media such as books, newspapers and journals - the types of media 'we', the IT immigrants, would often consider more valuable. In addition, the availability of modern sources of communication and social networking has led to an 'immediazation' of knowledge acquisition, validation and utilization. For IT natives, academic questions and social needs are expected to be satisfied in a single-second Google search, and thought processes should ideally be narrowed down to 140 Tweet characters.This paper discusses the pedagogical challenges and opportunities to educators presented by the iGeneration. We will argue that age-old pedagogical notions can be revisited in ways that enable the iGeneration to develop a critical capacity, allowing them to live intelligently in a highly technological yet increasingly fragmented and unintelligible world. …

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