In-Betweeners

Mostly because I'm part of the generation being described, I found this article by Anna Garvey a fascinating read. You may have seen the popular piece show up on your social media feeds depending on how many "Oregon Trail Generation" friends you have. Basically, Garvey is saying that there's a subgroup of kids born in the early 80s who don't quite fit with the Gen X crowd and don't quite fit with the Millennial crowd. We're right in between. A lot of what makes up the world of the Internet and social media was just emerging as we were becoming old enough to use it -- file sharing, instant everything, online chat, and even the eff word: Facebook. It wasn't there when we were in middle school (thank God), but it was there by the time we hit late high school/early college years.

It's interesting to consider the educational impacts of all the new tech that emerged as we were in our formative years. We aren't considered digital natives in the same way "today's kids" are, but from my experience in the classroom and as a graduate student, we may be much better equipped to learn new technologies than the generations that came just before or after us. No one assumed we knew how to use emergent technologies -- there was dedicated time and energy spent to teach us. I suspect we're doing current students a disservice by assuming they can learn with digital tools just because they've always been surrounded by them.