Because of their exposure to digital technology, kids today really are different. “This generation has developed what we like to call a ‘digital cultural brain,’ a brain that has been profoundly, and I do mean profoundly, affected by the digital culture into which they were born,” says technology expert Ian Jukes. In this Executive Briefing, he and colleague Lee Crockett call for a change in the way schools think about engaging students and using technology. The real goal, they say, is not to install more and more technology but to think more creatively about how each new piece of it can be used to further the real goal of 21st Century learning. In other words, they say, it’s really not about hardware at all: it’s about headware. The following is an abridged version of our interview with Ian and Lee.
Q: One of the main points you make in your presentations is that there is a tremendous disconnect between how our children learn in the digital age and how they are taught in the traditional classroom.
Ian Jukes: I’m going to start off by talking about the fact that we are dealing with the world that is in absolute change and we are experiencing change at an absolutely incredible rate. Now look, every generation experiences change, but you see in the past, most of the changes that we experienced—most of the experiences that our parents and grandparents had were “stylistic.” There were—there were incremental changes in the kind of clothing that we wore and the language that we used and the things we attached to our body. But what the research is telling us is that for anyone under the age of 25, the differences go far deeper and those changes had largely been driven by the arrival and the rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.
“Our students are actually neurologically wired differently than we are. And because they are wired differently than we are, they not only see, but they also interact with the world in a very different way than we do.”
The bottom line is that a great deal of research is telling us that while kids on the outside pretty much look the same as we did when we were growing up, on the inside kids today are completely different than previous generations. And it’s not just because they physically mature several years earlier than kids even 15 years ago. It’s not just because of the music they listen to or the way they talk or what they say or how they act.