Education struggles to keep pace

Today's students are indigenous residents in a technological world and embrace it as a matter of course.

in-DIGI-nous (in-dj'i-nes) adj

* Originating and living or occurring naturally in an age ignorant of libraries, vinyl records, and brandnew Benny Hill episodes.

* Today's student.

Okay, so indiginous is not a real word. There's no doubt, though, that it is a spot-on description of the overwhelming proportion of today's student population. The students of today have grown up in a world teeming with technology, much of which was pure science fiction when their mums and dads went to school. Consider that today's typical fourth-year university student in the US was born in 1984. Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard seven years before, the moon walk was already a quaint grainy film sequence, and the space shuttle was a routine reality. The stack of magazines waiting for recycling in the garage may have had an old copy of Time naming the PC as "man" of the year in 1982. The Apple Macintosh was released in that year with much fanfare and the folks probably owned a Sony Walkman and a pager - every adult wearing a tie had a pager.

A brief history of technology

About the time our graduate is learning to walk, Microsoft Windows is released and the Apple versus PC debate kicks off. For some students, their earliest memories include the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Just when junior is able to speak in short sentences, the US passes the one million mark in cellular subscribers. On TV, Star Trek, The Next Generation debuts; one of the futuristic devices featured in the series is a personal communicator with voice-activated dialling small enough to clip to your shirt. Cool.

Fast-forward to first grade. Around three in four of our young students' classmates have a VCR at home, cellphones have skyrocketed to nearly 12 million subscribers and this whole world wide web thing is showing up in daily conversation. Europe leads the US in public adoption of the internet with the Cern group (Britain, France and Germany) creating http and the first www page debuting in Europe as a links page, quickly followed by the US getting on board and producing nearly a million web pages.

Four years later and Netscape is the leading browser in the world, with Microsoft gaining fast. AOL is everywhere. Our student accesses an encyclopedia online and on CD-Rom. The sales of traditional encyclopedias are in a nosedive, never to recover.

Between studying for A-levels and agonising over the need for the perfect new pair of jeans, our student calmly embraces armies of content providers fighting their way to keyboard and cellphone. Amazon has become a household name, reshaping the way all those looming schoolbook purchases are going to be made. Talk of WAP is making the news - it promises to make the mobile even more indispensable, as the idea of having a few pence in the pocket to make a phone call has become as rare as phone booths.

As a peek into things to come, as early as 2001, Telenor, Norway's partially state-owned telephone company, reports a whopping 100 per cent ownership of mobiles by 16-year-olds followed by the UK a year later sitting at 80 per cent. Worldwide, mobile subscriptions top the billion mark. This huge market has providers' undivided attention and they are clamouring to satisfy.

Electronic information exposure

By the time the folks drop our student off at university, delivery and access of information has come from electronic devices for as long as memory serves. The ratio between exposure to information from television, radio and computers versus books is staggering. During their years at university, that typical US student owns a faster laptop than the family computer, has performed countless Google searches in preparation for exams and researching assignments, and stopped purchasing CDs in favour of downloading the music instead. Video is on demand, and when a night at the movies is in the offing the choice of what's playing and the resulting ticket purchase all occur online.

Simply put, today's students learn differently to previous generations. They have come to expect information to be presented In timely, dynamic and entertaining forms. And there lies the challenge for today's education professionals.

None of this comes as a shock to administrators and lecturers. This trend has been discussed before, and it forms the basis for countless initiatives in academia worldwide. But students are far ahead of schools along these lines, and the reason is simple: deep down we expect students to learn the way we did, and by and large perceive e-leaming initiatives as forward-thinking Initiatives delivering the all-important added value.

What this adds up to Is a paradigm gulf that separates students from the learning experience. This gulf threatens to widen as students' experiences and expectations continue to accelerate at a dizzying pace.

Ofcom, the UK's communications industry independent regulator and competition authority, has reported there are 62.5 million mobile subscriptions - a figure higher than the total UK population. One of the reasons for this is how early children are getting connected.

Last year, research consultancy Mobile Youth, whose clients include Orange and Disney, reported that unprecedented growth in 5- to 10-year-olds getting their first mobile had driven up to 5.5 million the number of under-16s with mobiles.

Quiet Please

As Google progresses to a verb, the irony of "Quiet Please" signs in increasingly abandoned libraries points up the speed of change in students' expectations. Learning institutions compete for the best and the brightest, but what will the next cohort of young luminaries expect by way of robust, portable, interactive, learning alternatives? I'll give you a hint - they'll probably call admissions on their personal communicator with voice-activated dialling small enough to clip to your shirt. Cool.