"Lament for the iGeneration"

Gregory Levey, Toronto Life Magazine - October, 2009

I'm beginning to think that I'm witnessing the end of education. The suspicion first arose when, in early 2008, Ryerson accused a first-year computer engineering student named Chris Avenir of cheating. Avenir was the administrator of a Facebook group called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions, through which he and 146 of his peers discussed homework assignments. When one of Avenir's professors discovered the group, he reported it to Ryerson's student conduct officer, alleging that students were sharing answers to assignments they'd been asked to complete individually. The students claimed they were merely discussing problem-solving techniques, as they often did in study groups. Avenir was given a failing grade in the course, charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct-one for running the group and one for each of its members-and threatened with expulsion. The incident received international media attention. Were the students cheating or were they just learning in a very 2008 fashion? The drama of the controversy was heightened by the fact that it took place at Ryerson, a school that prides itself on being technologically advanced; the school's ambitious president, Sheldon Levy, envisions the campus as part of a future downtown "digital hub."

To me, it seemed like a straightforward case of cheating. I agreed with James Norrie, Ryerson's then-director of the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, who said at the time, "Our academic misconduct code says that if work is to be done individually and students collaborate, that's cheating, whether it's by Facebook, fax or mimeograph." And yet, the students were convinced they had done nothing wrong and argued that Ryerson was violating their civil rights by shutting them down. It appears they believed their virtual lives, like the Web itself, should be entirely free from regulation. (Coincidentally, at the time of the incident, Ryerson was in the midst of updating its student code of conduct to cover on-line actions.) After a hearing in March 2008, the engineering faculty appeals committee found that Avenir wasn't party to cheating and restored his passing grade, although it did place a disciplinary notation on his transcript.

In the year or so since-which is eons in the digital age-I've been thinking a lot about the challenge of educating the iGeneration. When I started teaching communications at Ryerson three years ago, I was 28 years old-not that much older than my upper-year students. I'm addicted to my BlackBerry-which, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I check regularly in the middle of the night while lying in bed-and even as I write this sentence, I am concur­rently using Twitter and Facebook. In other words, I'm the furthest thing from a Luddite.

But the more time I spend with my students, the more I have begun to feel that in the decade separating us, technology has changed daily life so radically that our world views differ in irreconcilable ways. So for the past few months, I've been trying to decide if what I see in my classroom is just your typical generational change-the kind that every generation complains about-or if something more seismic is going on. I now believe that today's students are, for the most part, ill-suited to a university education, and that the fissure that currently exists between schools and students is unbridgeable.

Last year, the renowned American neuro­scientist Gary Small argued in his book iBrain that the constant use of new technologies by young people is changing the way the brain assimilates and stores information and processes interactions with other people-evolution of the species at a breakneck pace. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool," he wrote, "has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically." Even spending a few hours a day on-line, he showed, helps strengthen certain neural pathways, while weakening others. In his book, Small cites UCLA studies that showed how using on-line search engines trains the brain to create "shortcuts for acquiring information." The implication: young brains accustomed to finding information instantly are now less capable of storing it for the long-term-what some might call the definition of learning. The brain is programmed to acquire and store information only on an "as needed" basis.

Although the Internet has probably made today's students more dependent on the written word than their TV-focused forebears-think of how people under 30 use text messaging, instant messaging and the other variants on the theme-their understanding of written language is starkly different. For them, it is used only to deliver short blasts of information suitable for an audience with endemic ADD. When a 140-character Twitter post is the standard form of communication, the idea of writing even a 500-word essay seems faintly ridiculous.

Even more problematic is that Internet-speak is increasingly creeping into formal writing. Two of my students have used "LOL" in academic papers. Another, in a paper about cultural symbols, referred to "the Gr8 Wall of China." When I mentioned this to a friend who is a University of Toronto teaching assistant, she smiled and said she's seen many other text message acronyms in essays: "411" for the word "information" and "4ever" for "forever." A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project-run by the Washington, D.C., think-tank the Pew Research Center-found that 25 per cent of American teens have used emoticons in school work and that 38 per cent have used text short forms like LOL. Meanwhile, because of the convenience provided by on-line tools like Google and Wikipedia, students' sense of how knowledge is obtained has been vastly altered. Whether this is because they're not being taught properly in high school, or because they're not understanding-or just ignoring-their professors' pleas to use critical skills to evaluate what they dredge up in cyberspace, the result is a steady stream of insubstantial and illogical essays. The ease of using Google for research has created a situation where many students rely on it entirely, wholly unable to evaluate the credibility of what they find. An anonymous personal blog is as trustworthy as an article in a scholarly journal, and is perfectly appropriate for inclusion in a research paper. One student, in a literature paper about Jean-Paul Sartre for a third-year class at U of T, quoted icanhascheez burger.com, a Web site devoted to amusing pictures of cats.

To be sure, the Internet offers previously unimagined riches. But, as Scott McLaren, a librarian at York University who teaches writing seminars, says, it also offers students "challenges they are not necessarily equipped to deal with." My students constantly try to get away with using Wikipedia for academic research, and it takes me a while to explain why it's not a valid source. Some of them never get it. Many professors I've spoken with have encountered the same thing; my U of T teaching assistant friend even told me about a student who cited Wapedia, the version of Wiki­pedia accessible from cellphones. Apparently the student didn't have enough time to use the regular version.

While many scholars and journalists admit to using Wikipedia for a quick overview of a subject-there is obviously some value in its speed of updating and sheer breadth-they still wouldn't trust it as a reliable source. Occasionally, you hear the argument about it being more authoritative than traditional sources since it's policed by the millions, but that falls flat when you examine the accuracy of much of its information. (In 2006, for example, Wikipedia's entry for Tony Blair claimed that, as a teenager, the British prime minister had posters of Adolf Hitler on his bedroom wall-a claim that prompted a back-and-forth edit war.) None of that registers with most students, because cyberspace anarchy has completely devalued the idea of experts or authority. The new assumption is that knowledge doesn't belong to any set hierarchy; information is something that everyone can share-and even change.

Two years ago, New York University introduced a freshman orientation seminar called Facebook in the Flesh, which promised to teach students how to "build social networks in person." When I heard that, I had trouble believing it, but I shouldn't have. After all, I've had students who wanted to use Facebook to communicate with me about class assignments, and another librarian at York University recently told me that often a third or more of the library's computers are being used for Facebook. I'd venture to say the number isn't much lower in classrooms.

Which is why NYU isn't alone in trying to teach students how to navigate traditional social interactions as confidently as they navigate the Internet. Neumont University, a school in Utah that specializes in computer science and has a reputation for turning out top-notch tech talent, has begun a multi-pronged initiative to force its students to learn how to engage with the real world, instead of just the virtual world. Neumont students are now required to take three classes in interpersonal skills before graduating, and the university has formed social clubs, which the students are strongly encouraged to join.

Neumont's plan reportedly followed complaints from employers, who had noticed that newly hired alumni were addicted to their computer screens and not adept at interacting with their colleagues. Neumont also instituted periods of class time when laptop computers are not allowed. The students protested, distributing stickers with angry slogans about the policy. But the university stuck to its guns.

For my first couple years of teaching, I took a page out of Neumont University's playbook and banned laptops from my classrooms. I didn't want students surfing the Web while I was teaching. Surely for a few hours a week, I thought, they could put aside their computers and focus on one issue instead of multi-tasking. The request resulted in a lot of indignant and perplexed students. Nevertheless, they all complied, and the result was a more engaged classroom, with a higher quality of discussion. Then last fall, after I made my annual request to the class, one student looked down at his laptop and then straight back at me. I figured his computer wouldn't be there the next class, but I was wrong. I made the announcement again, which was a little awkward, and still got no response. On the third day, when the laptop appeared again, I said, "This will be the last time I say it, but I just want to remind you all that laptops are not allowed in my class unless you have a special reason, which you need to let me know about." The laptop remained open, and no explanation was forthcoming during or after class.

Several days later, I got an e-mail from him. Bereft of any salutation, capitalization or punctuation (it seemed more like a text message), it read, "i have never owned a notebook i've always used a computer i'm in fourth year and it's always been fine."

The essence of the problem was that the student was simply unable to imagine a scenario where he could not use his computer. We e-mailed about this for a while, and he claimed to have never written notes in class or used paper at all, and never been without a keyboard in front of him. My request clashed so starkly with his vision of the world that he decided to simply ignore it. I eventually threw my hands up and made an exception for him-defeated by the inevitability of the digital age.

When I mention the laptop addict to other students, they're largely sympathetic. Like the rest of us, they're accustomed to using the Internet for all manner of tasks, but unlike those of us over 30, they don't remember a time when they didn't, and so can't comprehend why anyone would want to ignore computers even for a little while. As one student put it, "That's like if the world is in three dimensions, but you're only operating in two."

In an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, wrote, "Information technology in the classroom was supposed to bridge digital divides and enhance student research. Increasingly, however, our networks are being used to entertain members of the 'Facebook Generation,' who text-message during class, talk on their cellphones during labs, and listen to iPods rather than guest speakers in the wireless lecture hall." This is not the modern equivalent of passing notes in class. Today's students are using the virtual world to mentally escape the classroom-they get points for attendance, but they can't possibly be learning much.

I recently read some correspondence between early-20th-century academics complaining about their students' ineptitude in Latin. I'm well aware that statements like Bugeja's and columns like this one may someday sound as amusingly anachronistic. But my impression is that the radical advances in technology over the past decade have made today's young minds incompatible with traditional learning. It isn't just what they know or don't know. It's also how they know things at all.

The simple fact is that universities are going to have to radically change. They'll need to find ways to accommodate students with ever-shrinking attention spans, who are used to instantaneous and interactive communication and not one-way lecturing. Not all of my students are like this, of course. Some read books for pleasure and are able to write lucidly. They're as sociable in real life as they are adept at pointing and clicking; they're able to retain new information; and some aren't even particularly tech-savvy. In my experience, however, these students are the minority. Earlier this year, I told some of my students a story I'd heard. An elementary school teacher reported to me that whenever one of his students heard something funny, he said "LOL"-or "lawl"-as though it were a word. Instead of actually laughing, he'd taken to vocalizing the idea of laughing out loud. Even my students couldn't believe this debasement of communication as they understood it. They shook their heads and stared at me, open-mouthed. I knew what they were thinking: kids these days.