Millennial Learners

The latest research on our student-learners’ view of the current state of education in America indicates that young people find traditional education irrelevant, uninteresting and unchallenging.  This new breed of learners is commonly referred to as digital millennials. Millennials are the generation of children and teenagers who came of age at the dawn of the millennium. This is the youthful generation growing up with technology as a natural influence in their lives. They know nothing else. They are unlike the previous generations that had to learn and accept technology as a new and different way to do things.  

Reflecting on the importance of this millennial generation, Born to Be Wired, a 2003 Harris Interactive extensive quantitative research project for Yahoo and Carat Interactive, found that:  

Millennials influence the present and are the future.  Pay close attention to them, as their usage of media influences other demographic groups and they literally represent the world to come. 

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education has compiled the following key facts about these millennial students: 

Largest generation (36% of total population).

31% are minorities; more diverse than the adult population.

Information has been universally available and free to them.

Community is a digital place of common interest, not just a shared physical space.

By 1999, 97% of kindergartners had access to a computer at school or home.

71% of online teens say they relied mostly on Internet sources for the last big project they did for school.

94% of online teens report using the Internet for school-related research.

74% of online teens use instant messaging.

The number of children ages 4 to 18 who own at least one wireless device (e.g. cell phones, PDAs) grew from 32% in 2002 to 43% in 2003.

 

These millennial learners are using their lifestyle technologies in their everyday personal lives:  

      Delivery Systems:

Internet, dial-up or broadband

Telephonic, wireline or wireless

Television, broadcast or satellite

WiFi or WiMax

 

      Delivery Devices:

MP3/4 devices, i.e., iPods, Zunes, & other misc. devices or PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant)

Video enabled or media cell phones

Microsoft Xboxes

Sony PlayStations

Nintendo Wii’s

Home PC’s & laptops

Home televisions

Wireless Internet Tools

The following lifestyle technology uses or tools (often referred to as social media) are a sample of the most popularly used in their everyday lives:

Blogs: perhaps, the best known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first.

Social networks: these websites allow people to build personal websites and then connect with friends to share content and communication. The best known example of a social network is MySpace, which has over 107 million members.

Content communities: communities which organize and share particular kinds of content. The most popular kinds of content communities tend to be around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links (del.icio.us), and videos (YouTube).

Wikis: these websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a communal document or database. The best-known wiki is the online encyclopedia (Wikipedia) which has over 1.3 million articles published in English alone.

Podcasts: audio and video files that are available by subscription through services like Apple iTunes and Microsoft Zune.

 

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s March 2005 release of its study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, confirms the sheer amount of time young people spend using all the types of media—an average of nearly 61/2 hours a day. This amount of usage makes it plain that the potential of media to impact virtually every aspect of young people’s lives cannot be ignored. This study was based on a nationally representative survey of 2,032 3^rd-12^th grade students ages 8–18, including an over-sample of African American and Hispanic students. 

What are these Digital Millennial Learners telling us?  

Today’s millennial learners feel strongly about the positive value of technology and use it in nearly every aspect of their lives. They are more comfortable with technology than their parents and their teachers. What they are telling us is they want to help us better understand this great new world of technology and its vast possibilities. And they want us to listen to them. Our country’s educational leaders must listen to these millennial learners and also quickly learn from them how to successfully bridge this new generational Digital Divide in order for us to horizontalize and allow for our successful participation in this new flat world.  

Some of their specific visions were shared when the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Education, and NetDay study (Visions 2020.2: Student Views on Transforming Education and Training Through Advanced Technologies) offered in the fall of 2004, 60,000 K-12 learners the following question:  

Today, you and your fellow students [learners] are important users of technology. In the future, you will be the inventors of new technologies. What would you like to see invented that you think will help kids learn in the future? 

Looking across the four broad themes of the learners’ answers and combining some of the most popular concepts in these answers paints a profile of how learners may wish to use technology for learning. In their view of this world: 

Every student [learner] would use a small, handheld wireless computer that is voice activated. The computer would offer high-speed access to a kid-friendly Internet, populated with websites that are safe, designed specifically for use by learners, with no pop-up ads. Using this device, learners would complete most of their in school work and homework, as well as take online classes both at school and at home. Learners would use the small computer to play mathematics-learning games and read interactive e-textbooks. In completing their schoolwork, learners would work closely and routinely with an intelligent digital tutor, and tap a knowledge utility to obtain factual answers to questions they pose. In their history studies, learners could participate in 3-D virtual reality-based historic reenactments. 

Susan Patrick, as former Director of Educational Technology, US Department of Education, in her remarks concerning the then current National Educational Technology Plan, best summarizes our country’s necessary educational technology planning direction:  

We should be transforming education vs. automating old instructional methods…This plan should help lead a systemic approach to change in education… We must align the learning environment to the real world of today… Students [learners] should be the center of our planning.