Most new college students this fall were born in 1992, and they are “a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow,” according to an Aug. 17 news release with Beloit College’s (Wis.) Mindset List for the Class of 2014. These students “will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship…”
The mindset list, published annually since 1998, aims to “identify the worldview” of 18-year-olds arriving at colleges across the country. Technology observations for this year’s class include:
- Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
- DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.
- They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.
- Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.
- Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
- Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.
- The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.
- The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.
For more details, see the Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset.
