Speeding Tickets for Millennials ?

There's a paradigm shift occurring and communication is no longer B & W print. (See my blog on reading evolution.) Students are skimming and scanning at warp speed--sometimes successfully and other times in error.  They are listening, watching, gathering, consolidating messages, concluding, reading and reacting.  

I often believe that millennials are operating in an entertainment mode whenever they hold a digital device.  I content that they have spend so much time trying to beat electronic games, that their MO online has fostered this fast-paced transient operation online.  Therefore, we educators have a big issue to deal with as students lack:

• Patience
• Persistence, and
• Focus

That is the profile of the transliterate generation. That is the educational issue of today.   While books such as iBrain, by Gary Small M.D. do a good job of convincing us that the millennials are equipped to assess some aspects of online credibility correctly, and think outside the box,  I believe that the transliterate generation must slow down and grab hold of a few metacognitive warnings.  (The book is good and well recommended, BTW.)  The Common Core requires us to embrace teaching models of rigor and complex text, yet our students do not have the habits of mind to embrace this.  Guess what: They need to be told that. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. 
We are busy building a lexicon of the discipline and doing action research to determine whether students succeed more when they are specifically instructed to: 

• Stop--Time - Out
• Slow down
• Put on your magnifying glass and act like a lawyer.

Try it yourself.  By doing a simple EQ investigation on learning habits of the millennials, the students themselves will come up with their own notorious impairments. [EQ: What are the characteristics of Millennials online and how might that impact your achievement?] Then, they might be ready to learn about metacognition.  After they are aware of this new learning MO in the library or classroom, I actually suggest you should give out speeding tickets from time to time.  If a student is caught in a wrong MO, drawing wrong conclusions, award a speeding ticket.  I'll let you determine the consequences.  

We joke locally about the habits of the online Millennials.  They usually fit into one of these categories:

• retreivers -- (hide 'n seek)
• spiders (crawling all around)
• Ants (piling it all up)
• Super-Squirrels, or
• Bee's - flying all over. 

What we really need are K-9's!  We need students who know the task at-hand and attack it and don't quit until they find what they were looking for.  They don't get distracted by imposters and scrutinize the area they are told to investigate.  How many classes can we get to operate that way?   

My late grandmother used to say, "Everyone's business is nobody's business."  Let's all work together to remedy this ailment...one class at a time.  For additional ideas on reaching transliterate students, see my article in this month's Library Media Connection (LMC) issue. 

More on Transliteracy

      While speaking with a colleague today, I was amazed at the lack of confidence the Boomer generation has in themselves.  They believe they are technologically behind the Millennials and will never catch up.  I beg to differ.   In actuality, the Millennials trying to find info on the Internet is akin to trying to drink from a fire hydrant.  
      We Boomers on the other-hand, may not be technologically savvy, but we are information literate (for the most part).  We can spot bias, assess whether an article is credible, we take the time to read the list of annotations before we click (we "pick, don't click").   We were raised to evaluate resources and took time to read them.  This generation doesn't evaluate them, let alone read them carefully.  
In steps TRANSLITERACY.   As Boomers become more technologically savvy, their skills will exceed the Millennials because they are transliterate.  We can take our literacy and translate it onto a new medium.  We can transfer our information literacy to a different operating platform.   We can readily ascertain whether a website or article is Credible Accurate, Reliable or Supported.  

      Give yourself more credit and show those young'ens a thing or two.  Have them visit http://www.wisegeek.com/  and ask whether the info is valid or credible.  How do they know.  Scroll down to the bottom and look for the authorship.  Ask them what they think about that corporate ownership name? 

SLMS 2010 - Inquiry sites as requested at the GenY Students = GenY classroom breakout session

Here are a few of the great Inquiry sites that are out on the web. We have a growing number of local librarians who have embraced inquiry with gusto and are polishing their ability to transform hide 'n seek research assignments into true authentic learning experiences. Please call me, if you'd like to discuss how you too can transform your research project, into a 21st Century Model. There are great sites all over the web. These are just a few:
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State Education Department-- K-4 Elementary Science Curriculum-- See Living Environment and Introduction.
http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/mst/pub/elecoresci.pdf
Foundations -- National Science Foundation-- Inquiry -- K-5 classroom- What dos it Look Like?
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf99148/ch_10.htm
Foundations-- NSF-- Inquiry Process Steps
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf99148/ch_10.htm
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf99148/pdf/nsf99148.pd f
NCTM—Illuminations site—Math Inquiry
http://illuminations.nctm.org/
NASA GLOBE Project
http://viz.globe.gov/viz-bin/home.cgi?l=en&b=g&rg=n
VirtualInquiry.org - Inquiry Snapshots
http://virtualinquiry.com/cases/index.htm