Those kids today: A debate by the academic set

Usually I'm straddling two very different territories -- writing about education issues for the youngest students one day and the oldest the next. For several years, I've been digging into research on early learning and childhood. But I started my career writing about higher education, and I still find myself writing plenty of stories that explore how technology is reshaping campus life or what privacy means for college students.

So it was great fun last week to come across a series of essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education that crossed the chasm to debate how the upbringing of today's kids is molding the next generation of college students. It's called the Wired Youth Dialogue. I can't find a direct link to it, or I'd send you right there. But first see the Sept. 19 post by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2007), a provocative book whose title enflames many people who work closely with kids and technology. A new essay by Bauerlein, "Online literacy is of a lesser kind," was published in The Chronicle Review the same day.

Then go to the essay by Siva Vaidhyanathan that cringes at the idea that young people can or should be lumped into any "generation," for so many of them are so different. For one, not all of today's kids, he writes, are as tech-savvy as we might think. As a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, Vaidhyanathan says he has witnessed that "the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years."

Lastly, to get a breather from this back-and-forth, check out Thomas A. Workman's essay "The Real Impact of Virtual Worlds." He offers five "norms of the digital culture" that he says can explain how students think about technology. For example, he says, students think of the Internet as a playground. Here are the outlines of his argument:

• Digital Norm 1: Internet use as play.
• Digital Norm 2: virtual identity as fictionalized personas
• Digital Norm 3: virtual socialization as a complement to live community
• Digital Norm 4: the global town square
• Digital Norm 5:online community as a response to barriers to live interactions

I've never come across Workman's writing before, but I'm impressed. He's an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, and previous articles by him, listed on his homepage, focus on interventions for binge drinking on campus. Maybe this is his first shot at writing about the impact of online technologies. But given what I've observed and read about "digital youth," this strikes me as a well-reasoned and insightful take on how kids are growing up today. He ends with this prescription for the older generation: "Our best preparation, then, is to train our own minds to think digitally, just like the students', so that we can best create policies, programs, and interactions that enable a student to connect the two worlds in ways that are productive, satisfying, and meaningful."