The Tech-Native Generation

I am in the unlikely position of teaching technology, especially computing, to Generation "Y" college students--those who a recent article in CIO Insight Magazine labeled as "tech natives." And at times, I feel like Orville Wright holding a flight seminar for a roomful of eagles. He may know all the engineering, but the eagles don't think about that--they just FLY.

A ski instructor told me that he could always tell whether a person learned to ski as an adult or as a child. Even though you could become a very good skier as an adult, you would never ski in exactly the same way that you would have had you learned as a child.

There’s a parallel in this story to the use of technology. Older adults have learned to use the available technology, but many of them use it in ways that are fundamentally different from the way you [individuals born between the early 1980s and 2001] do. Technology for you is ubiquitous and an essential part of how you operate day to day.

The CIO Insight article references the book Plugged In: The Y-Generation Guide to Success at Work, from which the following bullet points can be gleaned:

• You absorbed intuitively things that others have learned intellectually.
• Your real gift is not so much that you know how to use the technology; it’s that the way you use the technology causes you to think and act differently.
• You are comfortable living asynchronously. With your generation, time-shifting will come to the workplace.
• You coordinate rather than plan.
• You use multiple technologies simultaneously.
• You solve problems and perform tasks collaboratively
• You understand how to build and use digital networks.
• You’re comfortable working anywhere—and alone.
• You redraw the line between institutional and personal technology.

Many of these things are goals to which those "of a certain age" have aspired--or wished the technology had been there.

As we fly about--comfortable in our gleaming jets made of steel, impressed with the powerful machine we've built--some of us can't help but cast a wistful glance at the young eagle, effortlessly landing right next to us.