Reflections on "The Wired Life"

This week we read "The Wired Life", a chapter from the book Teaching Generation M by Cvetkovic and Lackie. This chapter examines, in more detail, much of what we already know about today's teenagers: they are more "wired" than any past generation. In fact, the authors claim they spend 6-8 hrs a day in "multitasking mode". This actually seems a little low to me, especially if you add in texting to others while in the classroom. But maybe the authors assume that most schools successfully keep students from doing this! Anyway, I question to some degree whether today's teens multitask any more than teens in the past. However, I would agree with the authors that teens today are much more connected to the large world and therefore their multitasking activities are broadcast to a much larger audience.

I thought it was an interesting point that teens today do not consider it rude to be in the same physical space with one another, but be texting, Facebooking, twittering, etc. with friends somewhere else. I think there is definitely a generation gap issue here because I've been out with friends and felt it rude when I or one of my friends is playing around with their iPhone and not paying attention to the conversation.

Developing and experimenting with one's self-identity has always been part of being a teenager. I can remember going through this phase where my group of friends, the way I would dress, or the music I listened to would rapidly change from one year to the other. The difference with today's teens is that the easy accessibility and wide variety of media outlets makes it easy to broadcast this self-identity experimentation to a much larger audience. I can remember thinking it was really neat when MySpace started becoming popular that people now had such an easy format for developing and broadcasting their individual creativity.

I do worry that the easy access of the web has made it too easy to acquire "celebrity" status, through personally demoralizing activities. I know that there is freedom of expression, etc., but it seems to me that too many teens put too much of their mind and bodies out there and that they may at some later point regret this.

So, what does all of this mean to education? As the authors point out, teens really seem to want to be involved in social activism and they want to be involved in a way that blurs the lines between local and global. So, teachers could design projects to teach core subject content through means of working on social activism projects. It would seem that such projects would engage students in a meaningful way, while at the same time helping them learn core content.