Living in a Digital World:
How Community Colleges Are Making the Connections

Today, in a world where change is the constant, you can't trust your eyes. As a result, the implications of global trends can only be understood by seeing them as part of the continuum from where they've come from to where they're heading. By carefully examining the significance of seven exponential trends (Moore's Law, Photonics, the Internet, InfoWhelm, Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, and Neuroinformatics) this presentation profoundly challenges your fundamental assumptions about the world we live in and the future that awaits us. It explores the impact these trends will have on our lives both personally and professionally then considers how they are and will affect our children, our learning institutions, the nature of teaching and learning, and even our definition of intelligence.

Every educator knows that today's kids are fundamentally different from the kids in the past. These differences have little to do with their clothing, hairstyles, body parts they pierce, tattoo and/or expose, or even the music they listen to. These differences have everything to do with the fact that many of today's kids, the Instant Messenger (IM) Generation, are growing up in a global digitally networked landscape filled with innovative, interactive, and powerful communication technologies. For most of this generation, there's never been a time when such technologies haven't existed. They are "digital natives" operating at "twitch speed." Digital natives process information, interact, and communicate in fundamentally different ways than any previous generation.

Meanwhile, many of us, having grown up in a relatively low-tech, stable, and predictable world, are at best, the "digital immigrants," struggling with the unprecedented speed of change, technological innovation, overwhelming amounts of information, and the unpredictability of today's world.

These are the constituencies that today's community colleges are dealing with. How can we best reconcile these new developments with current instructional practices particularly in a climate of diverse student needs and desires, with ages ranging form 16 to 80, and frames of reference shaped by all the countries of the world?