Posted for Robert Payo who is on the road at the 2007 EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference 2007.

So you’re stranded on a boat with multiple generations of learners: a baby boomer, a “gen x’er”, and a millenial “gen y’er”. The baby boomer looks for the manual to fix the boat while the the gen x’er goes online and the millenial–not engaging with the others–text messages for help during the commotion. Differences in communication styles across generations is nothing new.

Educating and training across generations in the changing face of technology and each generation’s perceptions about technology is a topic of significance when trying to understand how people learn and the environments in which they choose to learn, especially at the higher education level. Such a phenomenon prompted Rio Salado Community College, an Arizona school with a large offering of online courses, to provide their residential faculty with training from the Center for Generational Studies to understand what it means to manage and attract a student body and faculty that crosses four generations of learners. Linda Thor, President of Rio Salado College gave the opening general session at the Western Regional Educause Conference in San Francisco to an eager crowd of faculty members, instructional technology administrators and other instructional technology professionals.

Thor pointed to social networking online communities such as Myspace and YouTube and how they are being utilized in everything from politics (my.BarackObama.com) to advertising and what colleges can learn from the way that students receive and interact with information and how that applies to the virtual or traditional classroom. Understanding habits and needs of the millenial generation and how they engage in their coursework has paid off with the exponential growth in the number of online courses the college provides.

Because of the larger number of choices in how students complete their degree requirements, “students are no longer loyal to one school, they just want to get their degree,” Thor emphasized. With online courses, students have the freedom to select courses across a number of institutions with students having limited affiliation with one over the other—“swirling students”, as she called them. Thor pointed to criteria that students use to assess where to choose their coursework. Questions such as “Is it meaningful?”, “Is it cool; what would my friends think about it?”, and “Does the workload allow me to maintain a reasonable amount of balance with the other aspects of my life?” all factor into a student’s choice, choices that cross the lines of institutional loyalty when selecting the right courses for their lifestyles and needs.