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Based on blog written by Richard MacManus on 8/2/11.
I found the statistic presented in this article interesting as the author compares the younger twenties population groups with groups of students in their forties. I question the age of this author since I really do not think forties is old, but definitely older than students in their twenties. In any case the forties group or “traditionalist” were mentioned as less likely to use smart phones and other forms of digital media as compared to the younger group of “digital-media Junkies”. I think this would be hard to evaluate in a totally online course as you may not know the true age of your students, but you may be able to find out this information in the beginning of an online course. I think an instructor needs to understand that online technology resources may not understood as easily by your “traditionalist” student. Working as an instructor, you may need to do an assessment of your students to have a better understanding of what technologies your students are familiar with. If you decide to start incorporating a social network into your classroom, you may need to do some education to familiarize some of your students with what the online social network is all about. When an “older” student commonly uses newspapers to keep up to date on current news, you may need to educate them about online news feeds that are available. The statistics presented in this article comparing these two main age groups are staggering, but this makes sense as younger college students are being brought up with technology more than their previous generations. I thought what was interesting about the ‘traditionalist” student is that females in this category were significantly less inclined than males to use technology, and this was probably attributed to gender role differences. Anyway, I thought this article may be applicable to some online classrooms.
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