A recent news release from netimperitive titled Youth abandoning old media quotes a recent US report that finds that… “less that a fifth of 18-34 year olds rank newspapers as their primary source of news, while 44% check out internet portals such as Google and Yahoo for updated information.” This contrasts a little with the findings of the Kaiser Foundation survey published as
Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds which found… “children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using ??new media?? like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with ??old?? media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they??re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.”

Seems like yet another indication of the sort of thing that Michael Barbour has been discussing in his Virtual High School Meanderings blog, with a recent post titled Do today’s students think differently? Barbour quotes Ian Jukes and Chris Dede among others who assert that young people’s use of new technologies is actually changing the way they actually think – and thus create new knowledge.

In his blog, Barbour considers these ideas, then asks, if this is true… “Have we designed our virtual high school environments in such as way that it caters to these children who are wired differently than we are? Or have we simply created environments that we would do well in?”

A good question – and one that begs an answer from both face to face and virtual educators.