Your Students: 30,000 Hours and Online Gaming

Here is a great article with some interesting insights from Business Week about the up and coming generation of students (that we minister to as youth workers). It really puts into perspective the Net Generation. Here’s a clip:

The digital world that Net Geners have been weaned on is profoundly interactive. Kids have grown up to expect a two-way conversation, not a one-way lecture. This interactive reflex has a profound effect on what one academic has called their “habits of mind.” Instead of simply absorbing information—from a teacher or even a book—they go out and find it. As O’Shea’s story illustrates, the Net Geners use Google when they want to find out something. When they do so, they construct their own story, their own idea, rather than following the line of thought drawn by someone else in a book. This obviously doesn’t replace conventional book reading, nor should it. But what we’re seeing is a new form of literacy that many experts say is just as intellectually challenging as reading a book.

Now some critics say that because Net Geners don’t read books cover to cover, they don’t get a chance to follow a fully developed argument. The result, according to these critics, is that they never learn to build a frame of reference that the intelligent reader needs to interpret the world. My own view is different: In the online hunt you can develop your own frame of reference, which is based on far more information than we ever had at their age. I think this makes the Net Generation smarter than they would have been had they just spent the time sitting on a couch watching TV.

What are your thoughts?