Staying Relevant in a Flattening World

How well do you really know your students? Look at the Class of 2007. Today's high school seniors were born around 1990. The same year the personal computer celebrated its 15th birthday, and a gentleman named Tim Berners-Lee proposed something called the World Wide Web. The Class of 2007 was in first grade in 1996, the same year the Palm Pilot went on the market. Two years later, Google made its debut. Amazing Fact: These students have never known a world without the Internet. In the fourth grade, this class saw Sean Fanning create Napster, the first widely-used, peer-to-peer (or P2P) music sharing service. When these students entered middle school, Wikipedia was created, and the iPod was launched by Apple. Still in middle school in 2003, our students witnessed Skype (a peerto-peer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network) enter our world. When our future graduates were bright-eyed freshman, podcasts entered our vocabulary and began to win world wide acceptance. In fact, "podcasting" was the 2005 word of the year according to the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. As our group moved into their sophomore year (and became extremely wise in their own estimation), the world was introduced to YouTube (Time Magazine's 2006 Invention of the Year), a free video sharing website which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. As juniors, our class met MySpace, a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos. In 2006, MySpace reached the 100 MILLION 'accounts created' plateau and became the third most popular site after Yahoo and Google, meaning one in three Americans have a MySpace account. In their Senior spring semester, our students on January 9, 2007 heard Steve Jobs announce the Apple iPhone, a combination camera phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), multimedia player, and wireless communication device, that some experts are calling "A huge deal-this is the next home for the mind. Computers have had a nice long run, and laptops will always play at least some role. But the center of gravity is now slowly shifting from the desk to the device in your pocket" (Wikipedia, 2007). These are our students. This is what they have seen. These are the experiences that they grew up with. Our teens are technology rich and enveloped by a wired world. "Not my students," you say? According to a Pew Internet and American Life Report (2007). * 83% of all teens say that "most" of people they know use the Internet. * 84% report owning at least one personal media device: a desktop or laptop computer, a cell phone or a Personal Digital Assistant. * 44% report owning two or more personal media devices. * 32% of teens own laptops. * 45% of teens own MP3 players. Our teens are multimedia multitaskers. One could say that multitasking is a way of life - and people live in a state of "continuous partial attention. " Other interesting statistics to view from your agricultural education lens. * 57% of online teens have created some type of online content. * 33% of online teens share their creations online. * 32% of our students have created or worked on web pages or blogs for others. Using what Mr. Friedman refers to as technology steroids to improve our implementation of the fundamental principles of teaching and learning, can we as agricultural educators harness this creativity, this entrepreneurial spirit, this desire to learn and channel it into the agricultural industry and our classrooms? The question is not "Why," but "Why Not? " The heart of every successful agricultural education program, the reason we do what we do, the recipients of the premier educational delivery system in the world.OUR STUDENTS. are changing. That is the reason that this discussion is occurring. We all assert the necessity of being student centered. …