A new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that if your children aren’t asleep, they’re online. Even though I’m not a parent, this comes as no surprise–I’ve taught middle and high schoolers. Trying to keep them on task when a computer is in front of them is difficult, like getting a puppy to sit still (I do have a dog, but she’s almost never online–often asleep, though seldom online).

When it was time for standardized testing, I had to gather up the cell phones of my eighth-grade class. Not only did most of them have cell phones, most of them had cell phones nicer, newer, and trendier than mine. Monstrous devices with cameras and QWERTY keyboards–and me without even volume control (an issue that doesn’t quite bother me enough to get a new phone…still). We, my fellow teachers and I, caught them texting during other tests, both innocuously and begging for answers from peers.

In short, this generation of tech-savvy students takes their media consumption and social networking very seriously, like you and I take, say, eating. Keep in mind that an eighteen year old student was born in 1992, which was one year before AOL 2.0 for the Macintosh came out. At the time, those of us who were up on things were logging on with a blazing-fast 14.4 dial-up modem. Someone born on the day I first stayed up all night downloading music and eating Otter Pops because a friend had gotten a broadband connection would be the age of an eighth-grader.

It’s this age group, the digital natives, that’s in question. How do we relate to these kids? Even more importantly, how do we educate them?

Born Online: The Next Generation of Students

How do we, the adults who remember floppy disks that were actually floppy, bring our tried-and-true teaching methods to the technological fore? What we all think is super cool and new, is mundane to this generation.

I stumbled upon an interesting question while I was flipping through the blogosphere the other day: “If faculty NEVER or RARELY have transformative experiences using technology, can we expect their students to?” The extremely valid point this brings up is that many teachers aren’t integrating technology into their lives like their students have–or if they have, it’s all been a sort of leisure activity, not something life-altering but something free-time-altering. With this attitude, naivete, whatever you want to call it, it seems like folly to let contemporary technology near the learning process. This, of course, isn’t true. Recent studies have shown that people learn better with a combination of face-to-face and online learning (that’s better than one or the other alone–and online learning alone beat out the traditional classroom alone).

The new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation (aforementioned) took a close look at this new generation of students. The New York Times article on the subject revealed the following:

While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users — those who consumed at least 16 hours a day — had mostly C’s or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less. The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

Now, let’s all remember that correlation is not causation. Whether the heaviest users are so because they’re fleeing certain unnamed and unpleasant realities in their lives or this heavy using is driving the boredom and sadness isn’t a question that was addressed–nor would I expect your average teen to be able to accurately relay that information.

The fact that we’ve all got to face is that, try as we might, we see things differently than these up-and-comers. They are living in a world that, though full of what many of us would consider gadgets bordering on science fiction, is just as mundane to them as things were for us when we were their age. We can only ever pretend to see the world as they do. That doesn’t mean that we can’t relate, just that we’re going to have to relate like every other group of older people has related to the younger generations since time immemorial: with great gusto and limited success.