We interviewed Dr. Larry Rosen, Past Chair and Professor of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, for the upcoming publication “Campus Life in the Age of the Online Learner”.

This soon-to-be-published publication summarizes the work carried out by a group of experts in education in Barcelona, in which they tried identifying the elements of online learning design that can contribute to inspiring and motivating learners.

From the Net to the C Generation

Dr. Larry Rosen, Past Chair and Professor of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, is a renowned internationa
l expert in the “Psychology of Technology.” Over the past 25 years, Rosen has examined reactions to technology among more than 50,000 children, teens, college students, parents and teachers in the United States and in 23 other countries. He has written four books, and dozens of scientific articles. His most recent book, “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn” (2010), offers insights to motivate student learning. His new book, “iDisorder” will be released in March 2012 and will discuss how technology is making all of us exhibit signs and symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as OCD, ADHD, narcissism and depression.

Dr. Rosen’s favorite on-line sites are…

Facebook, Woot.com and CommonsenseMedia.

There is no doubt that technology has changed our way of relating to the world. Up until the late 1970s and early 1980s, we saw slowly emerging and evolving generations of people based on technology that took years if not decades to become part of our society. After the World Wide Web emerged on the scene, we started seeing technologies be introduced and rapidly penetrate society. The web itself took only four years to penetrate society compared with, say, the television which took three times as long to do the same. Since the year 2000 we have seen technologies that have been developed, distributed and become part of our world in months rather than years. YouTube, for example, penetrated society in only one year. Facebook took two years while Google Plus did the same in a matter of months.

In my work we have identified three new “mini-generations” of people based on how they use technology to see the world. In the 1980s a new generation of Internet-savvy children were born and have been called the Net Generation by most. In the 1990s, with the popularity of technologies with an ‘i’ in front of their names (iPhone, iPod, iTunes, etc.) emerged as a major force in a generation that embraced the ability to individualize their technology experiences leading to naming them the iGeneration. But then when we look at the children born in the new millennium we see that they are actually different than their older brothers and sisters and we are tentatively calling them “Generation C” reflecting their love of connectivity, communication, creativity, collaboration, community, and customizability all through technology. We are just completing a study looking at the values of these young children and plan to track them over time to note how their relationship to technology changes and develops.

Not really. Education, in general, has to change for a variety of reasons. First, teachers and schools must find ways to engage students. This is actually pretty simple. Watch what they do during their free time or while studying at home and then use those observations to determine what they find captivating and engaging. We are already seeing that teachers who introduce a variety of ways to disseminate information to students through all sensory modalities are seeing higher levels of excitement for education. Second, it is important to take into consideration that these new generations of learners are highly communicative and social so education must be structured to take these into consideration. Group projects are helpful and attractive to these learners as are online collaborations. However, these young learners still need to have extensive time to explore each other’s values and ideas in a face-to-face environment so that they learn the pragmatics of communication in ways that cannot be done when communicating behind a screen.

True! Kids, nowadays, aren’t happy just working on a single task such as homework. Instead, they’d prefer to do their schoolwork while listening to music and messaging friends, or with the TV on mute in the background, basically having multiple things going on. In that sense, educators must understand that these young learners exist in a highly engaging, task-switching environment and we must modify education to allow for them to learn when to focus and when it is acceptable—and not harmful—to switch tasks. Much of my latest research has been geared toward understanding the neuroscience of focus and developing models for learners that include teaching meta-cognitive strategies on how and when to focus.

Teachers need help in determining what materials or content can be transmitted to students equally effectively or even more effectively through technology. Teachers may not be familiar with all of the options available for obtaining content but they can find the help of a “knowledge broker” to assist them in accumulating resources that students can use outside of the classroom to impart the “content” and allow more classroom time for the teacher to analyze, assimilate and discuss material rather than using most of the time for presenting pure content. Alternatively, educators are beginning to see the popularity of social networks and are wondering how to include them into their educational plan.

This is because there has been so much media about how bad social networks are and how disruptive they will be in the classroom. Having said that, there is no denying that when a website such as Facebook garners 23% of all Internet time (one in every four-and-a-half minutes on the web are spent on Facebook) this means that it can and should be a part of an educational plan. I have seen projects using Facebook groups for classroom discussions or collaborative projects and these appear to work well and not only do not disrupt education but lead to enhanced learning. Social networks are not the only communication tools available to enhance education. Given the massive amount of texting done by students, educators are now beginning to incorporate text messaging into their classroom lessons in unique and creative ways to engage their already texting students.

I think that we are seeing indications that suggest that a good model would incorporate blended education with opportunities to work 24/7 from wherever the learner happens to be as well as opportunities to collaborate both online and face-to-face. The latter may be possible over video conferencing systems such as Google Plus Hangouts or Skype but research has yet to show that this virtual collaboration is as effective as face-to-face learning. Some of our research shows that gathering cues from a video chat is not the same as gathering cues from an in-person chat. With that said, education should offer students the opportunity to connect with a variety of technologies including social networking, wikis, blogs, or even three-dimensional websites such as Second Life.

The thing is we can’t simply take the same models that work in the classroom and assume they will work in the virtual classroom. One problem with allowing education to occur online is that this requires a level of meta-cognition that many students do not possess. When they live in their virtual worlds they are constantly switching from one task to another – checking texts, switching screens, checking Facebook – which is not the best way to learn classroom material. We have to develop online educational models that incorporate popular technologies but in a way that promotes focus and learning rather than constant task switching.

I am somewhat old fashioned when it comes to envisioning my “perfect” classroom either virtual or real. I would like to believe that my online education would incorporate all available tools and allow students to engage with the material and each other 24/7 by creating an active, off-site learning environment that is coupled with some face-to-face or video face-to-face engagement. I would love to have my lectures be virtual where I present material and there are concurrent active discussions between students in a variety of modalities. I think that we must make a distinction between providing content – which may be readily available in many modalities in the virtual world – and “understanding” the material that can be handled through student-teacher and student-student interactions and discussions. Some of these can be done asynchronously but some has to be done with all parties “present” to engage in a synchronous active discussion involving student-teacher interactions.

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