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Article Excerpt
Those who fear that we will leave the future in worse shape for the next generation, take comfort: The kids are not just all right--they've got it right, and about quite a lot of things.
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For the first time, the younger generation is an authority over older generations, said Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital. The Net generation (aka the echo boom, Generation Y, or millennials) are now "lapping" their parents on the "information track," he told the 850 attendees of the World Future Society's annual meeting, WorldFuture 2009: Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World, held in Chicago July 17-19.
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But if we want to help the Net generation succeed, Tapscott said, our institutions are doing everything wrong. "We do the opposite of what we should," he said, because "we fear what we don't understand." The negative view that society has of this generation now coming of age is not supported by the data.
For instance, the Net generation isn't reading newspapers or books at the rates that their parents and grandparents do, but that does not mean they are less informed. Tapscott quoted one young woman who said that, rather than reading a printed newspaper that only comes out once a day, she likes to "triangulate" the news by subscribing to 60 RSS feeds so that she can form her own opinions. Accused of only getting her news from the Comedy Central program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she replied, "The Daily Show is only funny if you know the news."
One of the things that institutions do wrong for the Net generation is to ban their tools, Tapscott warned. Social networking enables young people to learn in more collaborative ways and to become more engaged in tasks: They feel that working and learning are the same thing, and they get more out of it when it's social, entertaining, and fun. So Tapscott advised teachers to abandon the "drill and kill, sage on a stage" model of pedagogy, and managers to give workers license to self-organize, then give them the feedback that they need and want to get better.
David Pearce Snyder of the Snyder Family Enterprise focused on the role of education in preparing today's students for tomorrow's world. He argued that most of today's adults are ill-equipped to deal with complex decision making and that most of today's schools are failing to provide tomorrow's adults with "complexipacity"--the cognitive skills necessary for dealing with complexity, including systemic thinking, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, contextual learning, and cyber literacy.
Resistance to teaching beyond "core knowledge" is strong, Snyder noted, as it takes away from history, literature, and other subjects that represent (to the traditionalist's mind) a quality education. "But this silo thinking is what the researchers were saying is why adults can't deal with complex situations. So it's going to be a trick reinventing education," he said.
Resistance to new technologies also can be strong, often to the detriment of a business, said futurist consultant Michael Zey. Traveling salesmen, for instance, couldn't be convinced of the benefits of the first car phones. "They said the car was the only place they could get away from it all. The car phone was intrusive," he noted.
"Think in terms of the big picture--globally and holistically," Zey advised. Technology will continue to expand and population will continue to increase. The United States will have 400 million people by 2050,...
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