Digital Natives: The Students of Today

I am sure many of you remember our Aussie friend Paull Young, one of the speakers at UGA Connect who entreated us as students to take advantage of being a digital native.

On his personal blog, Young PR, he had some interesting thoughts about how our generation of students is already surrounded by this digital age and constantly immersed in technology. Consequently our passion for using these tools is what is going to change the communication industry.

Paull also had this awesome YouTube video on "A Vision of Students Today".





It reminded me of the video we watched early in the semester Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us. Well a bit more digging and crikey! They were done by the same guy!

Professor Michael Wesch at Kansas State University teaches a class on digital ethnography. His class is doing a similar assignment to our social media project in that they are all trying to become successful vloggers or video bloggers.

I am amazed at how much there is to learn about the influence of all this techie stuff on businesses, public relations and even cultures. Even projects that mere students and recent grads, like Erin Caldwell, are doing are having an impact on different areas of communications and social media.


As students of today's classrooms, we should expect integration of all these tools and applications in our education. UGA does a great job "Building a New Learning Environment" in the classes we take. There is even an article in today's Red & Black about Dr. Shamp's Second Life class.

But like Paull says, our learning must continue when we leave UGA, turning the web into our classroom. It is wonderful that students have classes available to them now to introduce new ways to communicate and foster relationships. When we graduate we must take it upon ourselves to continue to find and use the newer ways of social media that will inevitably be there.