On Thursday at the Lehrman Summer Institute in Princeton, Gerson Moreno-Riano and I led a seminar entitled “Teaching Today’s Millennial Students ‘18thCentury Skills.’” The title for the workshop came from Mark Bauerlein’s Chronicle of Higher Education article from March 2010 entitled “Employers Want 18thCentury Skills.” In his piece, Bauerlein cites a recent Association of American Colleges and Universities survey which reveals that most employers think today’s college graduates need significantly more instruction in what he calls “18thcentury skills -- effective communication (both orally and in writing) as well as critical-thinking and analytical-reasoning abilities.
Throughout a lively and wide-ranging discussion, we focused on the unique characteristics of the Millennials and whether or not access to online information and technology has made them smarter or dumber. We also spoke about how best to instruct millennial students in these “18thcentury skills.” Indeed, several Fellows talked about their teaching strategies and some of the specific assignments they use to strengthen students’ communication and reasoning skills. At the end of the session, I asked participants to consider posting one or two of their assignments.
During the workshop, I discussed an assignment I recently designed for my department’s Historical Methods and Historiography course, which I am teaching this fall. I will require each student to write an annotated-syllabus for a hypothetical course in their main area of historical interest. For instance, students can draft a syllabus for a course on “the American Revolution” or “Ancient Rome” or “History of Religion in America."
The assignment will require students to think in both broad and specific terms. They will need to impose order on a large body of evidence and think about the most effective ways to present complex historical topics. Students also need to select the course’s readings, which must include at least 1 monograph, 2 journal articles, and 5-10 primary documents. And they will need to annotate each selection with a short paragraph explaining why they have selected this work/document and how it adds to the course’s overall theme(s). Students, moreover, must design course assignments for the semester –such as quizzes, tests, critical book reviews, research papers, etc. – and they will annotate each assignment with another short paragraph explaining the pedagogical reasons for its inclusion.
Finally, as part of this overall assignment, I want each student to go to the Lehrman American Studies Center website and review the history syllabi available there and select the best one on the basis of its clarity, scope, and innovation. And, of course, they need to explain to me the reasons for their selection.
I believe this assignment will require my Millennial students to write clearly and concisely as well as help them develop their analytical reasoning skills. We’ll see how it works in practice this fall!
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7/05/2010
Teaching Millennials '18th century skills'
Do You Trust Your Social Network? - Bloomberg
Wouldn't you consider it an invasion of your privacy if marketers could rummage through your closet to check your brand preferences? What if potential employers could disguise themselves and enter your social life in order to evaluate you for a job?
These things can't happen, of course. We live secure in the knowledge that they are against the law.
Now consider Gen Y, whose members live in an open environment, and embrace social networking that breaks through the divide between their online and offline worlds. Their Facebook pages are a natural extension of their social lives, and they feel secure in the knowledge that they hold the keys to their personal spaces. As long as they play by the rules, they can choose whom to invite and whom to exclude.
Then, the rules are altered. Social network operators begin unlocking the doors to people's personal worlds. The recent debate about Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg; frequent changes in privacy settings in social media are resulting in an entire generation becoming increasingly wary and guarded about their private lives.
Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are, in general, willing to share intimate details of their private lives with an online audience. However, recent research by the Pew Internet Project found that although 75% of Millennials in the US have a profile on a social network, most place boundaries on it. In fact, the study found that members of Gen Y were more likely to monitor privacy settings than are older people, and more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they can't be identified. In another survey by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, 88% of a sample of Gen Y-ers voiced support for a law that would require websites to delete captured information. Sixty-two percent of them wanted the right to know everything a website knows about them.
Operators of social networks argue that relatively loose privacy restrictions improve the user experience and allow customization of the platform for each user. For instance, they can track likes and dislikes to provide each person with more relevant information. But isn't this a kind of cyber-stalking?
It's common knowledge that HR professionals take advantage of lax privacy settings to screen candidates based on their Facebook content. A Melbourne-based recruitment consultant believes that the practice of winnowing candidates based on personal information online is little different from excluding someone because of gender, sexual preference, marital status, or age. In a recent comment on an article in The New York Times, "Neville J." called on legislators to outlaw the practice. Judging by the large number of endorsements he received, many others share his sense of alarm.
Look at the broader issue. I believe that collaboration through social networks is an important way of building trust. Trust is built on transparency. If you are in the business of enabling collaboration through social networks, you have to demonstrate that you can be trusted. So, I ask, can you afford to change the rules midway? Or do frequent changes corrode the very foundations of trust?
Copyright © 2010 Harvard Business School Publishing. All rights reserved. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard Business School.
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The New American Revolution: Millennials Rise » Code for America
History is sometimes intimidating. Especially on days like today, we think of the Patriots in Concord firing the first shot of independence, the suffragists in New York taking to the streets for their rights, and the activists in Selma standing strong for equality. We hear stories of challenges and greatness in the past — the moments that made American history — and are overwhelmed at times by their magnitude. They won independence, expanded suffrage, and secured civil rights. They did all that: it’s been done. What are we supposed to do now? How can we meet their legacy? Where can we go, and what can do do?
We can start, I think, by remembering what these great moments have in common. These generations of Americans realized their time was marked by a opportunity to make progress — be it political, cultural, or economic — and they seized it to make history. And this generation, a generation evidently eager to do the same, should realize that we too can make a difference, in our own way. And that the world needs us to.
This desire for impact is well documented. Not only are we Millennials interested in the world around us, but we are also committed to being involved positively in it. The former is strikingly seen in the impressive participation rate in the past election. Students and young adults were engaged by both parties, taking part in campaign activities and voting at the polls at the highest rate in the past 50 years. And even after we turned the page on the poetry of the campaign, we have remained interesting in the prose of day-to-day service. The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 27 percent of graduating seniors in 2009 plan to work for nonprofit groups or government; another survey by the Partnership for Public Service found that 90 percent would be interested in a federal government job. And according to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, 66.3 percent of college freshmen said it is “essential or very important” to help others — the highest percentage in 25 years. This generation spends more hours in community volunteer work and service projects than any generation before it. This blend of political action and public service means that we want to show our patriotism through action — inside government and out. We want to serve our country.
But the nature of that service need not be defined by the traditional models of the past. As a recent Pew study, found, we realize that our generation is unique, and what makes us unique? “Technology use,” most of us said. This survey, fittingly titled “The Millenials: Confident, Connected, Open to Change,” went on to describe the profound role of technology for this generation: “Millennials’ technological exceptionalism is chronicled throughout the survey. It’s not just their gadgets — it’s the way they’ve fused their social lives into them… Millennials have been leading technology enthusiasts.” We live our lives online, and we have realized that technology can be used to make life better — more so than any other demographic. Technological innovation, the survey concludes, is the Millenials’ badge of generational identity; it is who we are.
And it’s what we should do.
What we bring to the table is an eagerness to serve, a passion for change, and a comfort with modern technologies: all things in high-demand for governments, struggling to provide essential services because of out-of-control budgets and outdated processes. The very tools we use casually everyday are in need urgently inside government, from the State Department to City Hall.
Tech volunteers working with the Crisis Commons made a huge difference in the Haiti Earthquake relief earlier this year; grassroots mappers using homebrew balloons and camera rigs are helping to track the Gulf oil spill. Others are crowdsourcing investigative journalism, or building tools for government transparency.
But it’s not just grand crises that call for our involvement; making the world a better place begins right where we live.
And one of the biggest problems government has today is doing more with less.
Consider for example traditional 311 services. If you’re walking along the street and see a street light out, what can you do? You can get out your cell, call the city to report it; a municipal worker has to pick up the call, transcribe the information, submit it to the public works department manually, and then send staff out to document your report. This costs the city money and time, and just as importantly, who really wants to close Facebook or stop texting to make that call? That’s just not how we communicate. If technology has already changed the way we work, and the way we talk, why can’t it change the way we govern? It can. The Open311 API, for example, allows developers and entrepreneurs to build simple but powerful apps which make it easy to report issues: you just tweet it. And that’s just the start.
This kind of innovation is about more than just fixing potholes. It’s about re-imagining governance for the 21-century — helping government catch up with us, move as quickly as we do, and speak in our terms.
That’s what we’re about here at Code for America.
It’s time we have our own American Revolution.
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