it's about time to start keeping un-gifted xmas presents?

"Students on average retain 10 percent of what they read but closer to 30 percent of what they see. Much of the reading done by the Net Gen has been on the Web, where they are more likely to scan than to read.

In fact, overreliance on text may inhibit Net Gen participation. Net Geners “prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite.” In one course (Library 1010 at CSU–Hayward) significant numbers of students would not process extensive written directions. They would either try to infer the directions or they would turn in incomplete assignments. When the homework was altered, presenting pictures first rather than words, refusals to do the assignment dropped (by 10–14 percent) and student scores increased (an improvement of 11–16 percent); pretest versus post-test scores gained 4–9 percent."

From my Net Gen online book. This class is already sort of strange, because the text focuses heavily on those who are reliant on technology over any other means of communication, which is partially true in my life...it is even a little reassuring to hear that I'm not supposed to be able to focus on one task at a time or have the odds stacked against me when assigned an ambiguous project. However, I don't feel the pull toward immediacy the way younger people do. In fact, I find it pretty annoying and immature, like a toddler mindset.

Visuals, group projects and peer-to-peer instruction will be prevalent methods used in my future classroom. These methods are useful even for me, but the way students should be taught is very different from how I was taught to learn. (Obv, I like the idea of sitting in a lecture class, listening to someone talk and NOT texting, fucking around on the internet or trying to figure out some way to multi-task. That is the "structure" my generation apparently craves, but anyone more than two years younger than me is incapable of.) Everyone's reliance on discussion based classes seems to contradict what I know from my experience- that most middle and high school students find it difficult to speak in front of their class and even specific questioning often only engages a core of already achieving students.

Listening to: Bishop Allen, "Little Black Ache"