League’s Technology Conference Examines Changing Students and Emerging Technologies

The new learning styles of the different generations now attending the nation’s community colleges pose difficult challenges to planners and administrators developing technology infrastructures for the future.

That was one of the key themes emerging from the 23rd annual Conference on Information Technology, held last month in Nashville and attended by more than 2,300 people from around the country.

Sponsored by the League for Innovation for the Community College, the conference offered an opportunity for participants to ponder how emerging technology is changing both the art and the science of education and instruction.

The keynote address was delivered by Mark David Milliron, former league president and currently president and chief executive officer of Catalyze Learning International, a North Carolina education consulting firm.

Milliron said the generations of students now filling community college classrooms – baby boomers, “Generation X” and “the net generation” – have radically different experiences and expectations when it comes to technology.

For baby boomers, for example, the chief technological advance during their lifetimes was television. Members of Generation X, meanwhile, came of age as video games and their brethren took off. For the current generation, it’s the Internet, cellular, Ipods and Blackberries.

Studies have shown that the youngest generation of students now spends about 12.2 hours online every week. That’s about 50 percent more time than the average baby boomer, Milliron said.

What that means is younger students are much more apt than their older counterparts to use text messaging and blogs to communicate with one another, and join Web communities such as Facebook or MySpace.

Educators must be mindful of the differences as they try to reach current students, and plan for future generations of learners.

“We are preparing a learning system for multiple generations of learners,” he said.

The challenge is to integrate evolving technologies as educators strive to both engage students in meaningful learning experiences and design new buildings on college campuses, Milliron said.

New technologies, some not even invented yet, pose a significant challenge for college officials, Milliron said.

 “How do we build the infrastructure?” he said. “We are still segregating our conversations about our buildings and our technology.”

 Delivering technology to those who have not been included in the net revolution was the focus of a general session presentation by Randal Pinkett, president and chief executive officer of BCT Partners, a management and technology consulting firm. An entrepreneur and scholar, Pinkett won wide notice in 2005 by winning the reality show television program “The Apprentice.”

But before he was hired by Donald Trump, Pinkett was instrumental in an experiment designed to bridge the digital divide between the affluent and the disadvantaged. For all the technological advances that have made life easier, the poor and the uneducated often don’t have access to computers and are being left behind in the digital age and the economy that goes with it, according to studies.

Pinkett’s explained that his experiment, which he undertook as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, unfolded at Camfield Estates, a 102-unit, predominantly minority housing development in Roxbury, Mass.

In conjunction with MIT’s Center for Reflective Community Practice, Pinkett and fellow student Richard O’Bryant set the Community Connections Project. The effort gave all residents of Camfield Estates free computers, placed inside their homes. The computers came with training, equipment, software, and cable-modem Internet connectivity.

The results of the effort show that computer technology can be critical in building and strengthening communities, Pinkett said.

An assessment of the experiment showed that the new computers reinforced and expanded local ties, increased awareness of community resources and improved communication among neighbors. Most importantly, access to technology helped residents of Camfield Estates identify themselves as learners capable of joining the Internet age, the assessment found.

Colleges can learn some lessons from Camfield Estates, Pinkett said. It can provide a roadmap for coordinating multiple activities, developing a curriculum that supports community-based outcomes and sustaining the initiative over time.

Each college must forge a path within the context of its unique social and cultural environment, according to Pinkett. Focusing on the “community” in community colleges in the role of providing community access to technology, he emphasized relevant outcomes beyond mere access. 

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