Rodney sent me this article in the Washington Post, The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It:

Because visual literacy is not required in schools, she says, "this generation's ability to assign meaning to the visual texts of others is passive and still needs a great deal more work. They are easily manipulated as students, consumers and citizens."

In other words, students today need to be taught, through images, how to think critically.

This is a familiar refrain, right? Well, last week I was reminded of how really OLD this type of argument is. I was watching Blackboard Jungle - a film that did a lot to create the category of "Juvenile Delinquent" in the 1950s. The story has been redone a great deal in recent years. Higher Learning comes to mind. But, more to the point, Blackboard Jungle was trotting out this "visual learners" argument in 1955. One of the ways that the teacher in the film reaches his students is by showing them a cartoon and then having them analyze the stories. After having such success with these leather jacket wearing hooligans, other teachers ask him what he's doing differently. I wish I could find the exact quote, but he explains that "kids these days" are visual learners...that you have to meet them on their own terms if you really want to reach them.

Matt just pointed me to this interesting article from Innovate. The piece is about how perceptions of the "Net Generation" can be reductive and how such perceptions have affected pedagogy. Here's the abstract:

In this article, Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer argue for a more nuanced understanding of Net Generation students and their technology practices than received wisdom currently offers. The realization by college and university administrators that Net Generation students, having grown up digital, will learn differently and make new demands of their learning environment has led to changes in many sectors of academic life, with a particular focus on campus infrastructure, faculty development, and curriculum. However, these well-intentioned efforts to adjust to the perceived needs of Net Gen students are frequently made based on a vision of the Net Generation as a homogenous group of technology users. Lohnes and Kinzer argue that a much deeper understanding of student technology practices, and the intersection of these practices with student learning, is critical. To this end, they offer a small ethnographic study of liberal arts college students' technology practices, the results of which indicate that, contrary to common assumptions, we may not be at the point of changing the classroom practices of either professors or students. Addressing on-the-ground student technology practices, they conclude, may provide a better way of considering the complex picture of technology integration on campus.