Why Professor Johnny Can't Read

    Can linear learners teach the N-Gen learners of today? This is a question that is being posed by Mark Mabrito and Rebecca Medley authors of “Why Professor Johnny Can’t Read: Understanding the Net Generation’s Texts.” If you are wondering which category you belong to, they say anyone born before 1982 are among the traditional learners. This article dives into the nature of N-Gen texts and how instructors of a previous age are falling short by not getting involved in the complex knowledge base that these students are exposed to.
 
    Even though many educators are considerate technology savvy, “most did not grow up in the digital culture common to many of their N-Gen students” (Mabrito and Medely, 2008, p1-2).  Faculties are having a difficult time making sense out of the texts produced by these learners. N-Gen students have been digitally bombarded by texts of this nature, which have allowed them to cultivate knowledge to help them read, comprehend, and generate these texts.
 
    N-Gens are constantly networking, multi-tasking, and or creating through a wide variety of online communities, and yet the classroom is set up in a way that narrows their playing field and inhibits these tools and technologies that they have come to rely on.  
 
Video, video-sharing, photos, virtual worlds, online journals, blogs all of these are common ways that N-Gen students are creating their texts. These texts are much different from the texts of previous generations (p2).  There is interaction in a typical classroom, but “much of the pedagogy is built on models that require solitary independent learning” (p3). The challenge seems to be to create a pedagogy that includes the skill acquired by these learners. It seems to be that there is “not a generation gap but an information processing gap” (p5).
 
This was a great article. I have been very interested in this idea of N.Gen students and what we as educators are doing or could be doing to bring their technology learning experiences into the classroom.  There is a new kind of understanding out there and we as life-long learners should be a part of it.
 
Mabrito, M., and R. Medley. 2008. Why Professor Johnny can't read: Understanding the Net Generation's texts. Innovate 4 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=510
(accessed September 26, 2008).
 
 
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