Teach them to network or be damned – In this article from Eye Magazine (and posted at the Eye blog) Deborah Littlejohn highlights what I think might just be the mother of all generation gaps. She takes a design focused approach, but her argument could easily be applied to any field.

From this perspective, students are not just individualised learners, the computer is not just another production tool, and the classroom studio is not a self-contained entity where students acquire knowledge to be applied later outside in the ‘real world’. This type of connected pedagogy can be envisioned as a part of a wider network of learning, fostering engagement with the field that continues long after students receive their diplomas. The design classroom and its curriculum of projects, critiques and comps still have a crucial role to play in such a context, but they have to be connected with what students already know about in their world.

The danger here – and this is evident not only in education, but in the workforce as well – is that the entrenched minds that rule the roost right now have not expressed a real concern for the severity of change that is coming their way. Granted, there is some forward thinking in some pockets, but for the most part the situation is in fact rather dire. The “type of connected pedagogy” that Littlejohn speaks to in this article is slow in coming.

It seems to me that unless there is an awakening within the “digital immigrant” population currently at the top of the food chain (especially the unwilling and intolerant immigrants) they may very well be pushed aside by an unstoppable economic and cultural wave of Darwinian change. If the Internet – and the culture of youth born into it – has shown us anything it’s that information will find it’s own level – it will route around the obstruction.