Pages 10-15 Teaching the iGeneration

I've seen adults do something similar and gloat about how Internet-savvy they are and how fast their smartphones navigate cyberspace. But each and every kid acted like this practice was commonplace.

A few days later, I had another enlightening experience. A colleague's 7-year-old son, Mikey, has his own iPad courtesy of his grandpa. A week ago, he was visiting our lab and wanted to print something from his iPad. His dad said that he would have to wait until he got home because although our new printer had Bluetooth access, nobody had yet figured out how to make it work. Mikey got to work and had his document printing in 10 minutes.

My colleague told me that when the family decided to upgrade the computer operating system at home, Mikey volunteered to do it. In an hour, all the laptops in the house had the new operating system. I could go on and on about Mikey's prowess, but his dad assures me that he is just like all his friends; although he's smart, his comfort and ease in using technology are nothing special.

One last story, about an even younger child. I was at a restaurant the other night and watched a mom hand her daughter her iPhone to keep her occupied. The mom later told me that she expected 3-year-old Brittani to play one of several built-in games, as she had done a couple of times before. To her surprise, Brittani asked whether she could download a game from the app store. When her mom said yes and showed her the link, she tapped the icon, watched the game load, and without hesitation began playing.

These stories give me hope for our current and future generations of learners. To them, the smartphone, the Internet, and everything technological are not "tools" at all—they simply are. Just as we don't think about the existence of air, they don't question the existence of technology and media. They expect technology to be there, and they expect it to do whatever they want it to do. Their WWW doesn't stand for World Wide Web; it stands for Whatever, Whenever, Wherever.

New Generations

Studying generational similarities and differences can be tricky; no individual completely fits the profile of a particular generation. But research suggests that the majority of people born between a rough set of dates actually do share many characteristics (see Strauss & Howe, 1991).

Those born between about 1925 and 1946 are often called the Traditional or Silent generation. Growing up through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, they are characterized by a belief in common goals and respect for authority. The Baby Boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, tends to be optimistic, idealistic, and communicative and to value education and consumer goods. The next generation, born between 1965 and 1979, were defined by Douglas Coupland (1991) as Generation X in his book of the same name; the label X signifies that, compared with the Baby Boomers, Gen Xers are not as easily categorized.

With the 1980s and the birth of the World Wide Web, the power of cyberspace came to the masses and a new generation of web surfers, very different from their predecessors, was born. The most common label for this generation is Generation Y, simply meaning the generation after X. Some people stretch this generation past 1999 and refer to its members as Millennials. To me, these names are an insult to our first true cybergeneration. This generation should not be defined by the next letter in the alphabet or by the turn of the century. I believe that Don Tapscott's (1999) term—the Net Generation—better reflects the impact of the Internet on the lives of its members.

On the basis of our research with thousands of teenagers and their parents, my colleagues and I have identified a separate generation, born in the 1990s and beyond, which we label the iGeneration. The i represents both the types of digital technologies popular with children and adolescents (iPhone, iPod, Wii, iTunes, and so on) and the highly individualized activities that these technologies make possible. Children and youth in this new generation are defined by their technology and media use, their love of electronic communication, and their need to multitask.

Parenthetically, we are just starting to examine a separate minigeneration of kids like Mikey and Brittani, who not only are facile with individualized mobile technologies, but also have the expectation that if they conceive of something, they should be able to make it happen. If an app doesn't exist for something they want to do on a smartphone, they just assume that nobody has created it yet and that it should be a piece of cake to do so. All in all, a fascinating minigeneration.

Consuming a Massive Media Diet

In our studies of thousands of children and teens at the George Marshall Applied Cognition Laboratory, my colleagues and I have found that the iGeneration consumes massive quantities of media. In anonymous online surveys, we ask young people how much they engage in a variety of activities, including being online, using computers offline, listening to music, playing video games, talking on the telephone, instant messaging, texting, sending and receiving e-mail, and watching television (see fig. 1).