Generation Facebook - NYTimes.com

Katrin Bennhold via NY Times

Privacy concerns divide the generations almost as much as technology. “They have a very casual attitude to privacy,” says Wehleit. But that’s just it: The flipside of this attitude is that teens like Eva, Johannes, Leo and Arne are much less selfish with their knowledge than we were. They share their study notes not just among friends or in their class, but across the country: Abiunity.de is a goldmine of shared files on every exam subject on the German syllabus. Unlike us, many of them study regularly in groups and seem to be much better at it.

“They are much less hierarchical than you guys were,” observes my former biology teacher, Gerd Schiefelbein.

[…]

Today they use social networking to rally around the coolest band of the day and organize ad hoc parties with amazing turnout. As adults they will have the tools to rally large communities around the causes they care about at unprecedented speed. They don’t mind small tailored ads, but abhor big intrusive ones. They trust one another more than politicians and big companies. My bet is that they will be demanding customers and demanding voters.

At my old school I was struck by how much teenagers have changed. But I was also struck by how little the school had changed, and I don’t think it’s an exception. Teachers are right to fret about attention deficits and lazy thinking. But no fundamental rethink seems to have occurred about how teaching and learning should take place in the age of social networking.

“The problem is with adults,” says Leo.“If they say we’re becoming more stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented.”

“We need better teachers and talk about more relevant stuff in class,” he adds. “Maybe they should ask us for some advice.”

One of the fundamental issues hasn’t changed since my day: they like to say the word ‘learning’, but mostly they mean ‘schooling’. Do what the teachers want you to do is mostly not about learning, its about conformity.

But the world of young people has dramatically changed — the social revolution — and schools have not kept pace. For example, there is no mention in this piece about trying to integrate social tools into the curriculum, only tales about the educators trying to keep it out.

I would like to find a school that has attempted to recast itself around social tools and their application to education: a social education case study.

(Source: underpaidgenius)