New generations of Learners – Old generations of Instructors

I have worked as an educator, with students of various ages, for over 30 years. About twenty years ago I woke up to the reality, that the world is changing outside the walls of educational institutions. Since then I have more or less strived to use modern technology in the classroom to make the students integration into their working life more organic. 

Since 2000 I have been involved in mentoring and training Intructors and students to utilise digital technology in education and learning. A lot of support is needed. E.g. most of the Intructors have expressed their appreciation of the IT-skilss training and have said that without it they wouldn’t be confident enough to utilise etools in their classrooms.

There is an illusion that so called diginatives don’t need training in ICT-skills. They really do as we can notice in the following citation!
It is also necessary to teach how to use IT applications to diginatives, i.e. those who were born in the 1990s and later. Bertta Sokura is worried about the fact that no one is responsible for ensuring that young people acquire adequate skills to be able to utilise the most commonly used applications in companies and education institutions: work processing and spreadsheet. (Aalto University, Bertta Socura 2016. Even diginatives need IT education. <https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/even-diginatives-need-it-education > Accessed 10.5.2019.)

Many educational institutions in 2019 are still one or two steps behind reality. I fully agree with the following Wikipedia-article about the major educational dilemma facing us today:

“Education, as Marc Prensky states, is the single largest problem facing the digital world as our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.” (Read the whole article:< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native > Accessed 28.5.2019. )

Timo Raatikainen