The net generation and new ways of learning

Summary

According to Diana Oblinger, the author of “Growing up with Google,” the NET GENERATION, who grew up with Second Life and “mashups,” sees education with a different lens than those before them. Diana Oblinger said that the Net Generation thinks of education as if it should be run like a business. Learning has taken a new form due to the increasing capabilities of today’s technologies.

According to Oblinger, many students use the internet as a way in which they communicate with each other. Through the internet, they collaborate with each other on developing scholarly works (such as “The Flat World Project”). No longer are the students individually learning the materials by reading textbooks, but instead they work as a team in designing a product or solving a real life problem. Through mingling with the virtual worlds such as Second Life, students are able to interact with their peers around the world and become more educated.

Moreover, Oblinger warned of the misconceptions that we may have about the Net Generation. Not all of them know how to find trust worthy information on the web, even though they may prefer online research more than library-based research. And that not all of them have the maturity to act responsibly in regard to information they obtained over the internet.

Critique

I think that Oblinger has made a few invalid ideas in regard to the maturity of the students of the Net Generation. She said that they are less likely to reflect due to the high emphasis on experience-based learning. The problem might get worse if they are put into a learning environment (such as Second Life) where they are allowed to explore ideas without any guidance from a teacher.

To some degree, I actually think that students will reflect more in an online learning environment rather than in a classroom environment. Since the information provided through online learning programs will not be time-dependent, students can contemplate on a particular problem/situation without being distracted by extraneous noise (or their classroom friends).

Oblinger also said that students are less likely to think critically/logically. Yet I actually think that the Net Generation will be more logical thinkers than we do. The reason is that students are not required to response to questions posed by their instructors in a classroom full of people, in a short period of time. Instead, the students learn through well-organized, pre-developed instructions in which they can visualize and analyze without much distractions (and they can also press the “playback” if they later need).