Looking back at a rejected ELI 2010 submission

In the spirit of ed tech history, I was reminded in a roundabout way of a rejected Educause submission Mark Bullen and I submitted in 2010. We’d been researching and writing about the absurdity of the Net Gen discourse for a couple of years by then, Mark’s Net Gen Nonsense blog was already a well established resource for collecting and disseminating on the topic, we had a peer reviewed article published, and more than an handful of presentations on the topic.  Interestingly, I recall that being on the other side of the Net Gen discourse fence felt like being the weirdo at a party full of cool kids, and I know that Mark had his share of fielding comments on the blog and even f2f at our institution in an environment where Net Gen, Digital Natives and Millennials were the rationale for pretty much anything ed tech.

At our own institution we had some lessons learned about Net Gen-ing  ($$$) your ed tech  infrastructure to respond to the Digital Native phenomenon.  So when the ELI 2010 call about Learning Environments for a Web 2.0 World came around, we thought we had something to share. End of story.  Historical artefacts below.

Our Submission

This session will focus on the importance of making evidence-based  learning environment design decisions. We will argue that key design decisions in higher education are increasingly being influenced by  unsupported claims about the nature of learners. These decisions can be costly, can alienate learners and instructors, and can have a negative impact on teaching and learning.

1. Learning environment design decisions should be based on sound  research

2. Educators need to be much more critical of claims about the nature  of learners and their needs

3.  Educators need to distinguish between the different types of  research (academic, proprietary, government) and understand the  implications of using these types of research

Understanding our learners is critical to making informed learning environment design decisions. However, there has been a largely uncritical  acceptance of the Net Generation discourse which suggests that today’s learners are fundamentally different than previous generations and that we  need to make radical changes to learning environments to accommodate  these differences. But an analysis of these claims reveals that there is little solid research-based evidence to support them. In fact, the sound research  suggests that generational differences are not significant. We will analyze the research and present data from an ongoing international research  project to argue for a nuanced approach to learning environment design.