Notes from West Egg

My daughter is 18 and getting ready to leave home to go to college in another state. Like most teenagers she is very comfortable with online social networks, and she spends a lot of time on Facebook as she waits for the long summer days to pass. I once dismissed MySpace and the like as time-wasting hobbies with no practical purpose — hornets’ nests of gossip, drama and narcism, dangerous lures for child molesters, etc… but that was when she was 14 and I was an idiot. I’ve since learned that 18-year-olds utilize Facebook in amazingly sophisticated ways, and I think the adults of the world need to catch on to this before the kids leverage the information and put us out of commission.

Here’s one example. Pretty much the most important questions facing any student the summer before they move away to college are… what dorm will I get, and who will my roommate be. Other nagging questions might be, who will my friends be, what are the other students like, will I fit in, what will my professors be like, etc… It’s all very anxiety producing, as we could sympathize if it were us leaving home and family to live alone with a stranger for the next year. But with Facebook, many of these questions have been answered two months before my daughter even packs her bags. 

Last week at her orientation, it was made very clear that the college is not going to give out roommate information and dorm assignments until some time in August. The kids would just need to be patient. So how does my daughter currently know what dorm, floor, and room she’ll be in? How does she know who her next-door neighbor is and who a half dozen of her floor-mates are?

Social networking.

She joined a group on Facebook consisting of freshmen who will attend her college in the fall. One of the students noticed that when you check the parking pass assignments on the university’s online information network, you can find your dorm and room number — even if you have no intention of bringing a car to college, ever. The information is there for all students. Within minutes, the kids clicked their way over to the parking info. and started piecing together their assignments. Over the last couple of days they have announced them to the Facebook group and are becoming acquainted with the people they will be spending the next year of their lives with, and possibly the next four years! The dots are connecting very quickly as more and more students announce their rooms. I’m not sure the university knows about the back door they left open, but the kids found it, and they’re collaborating.

My daughter has not met her roommate yet but thinks the girls on “her” floor are a fun bunch. She’s seen their prom pics, their graduation photos, read their blogs and seen members of their families. All of this, two months before school starts. Two weeks before any of them were supposed to know anything.

Ken Kay, president of Partnership for 21st Century Skills, says this in this video:

“So the coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they’re going to need to know for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be, do you know how to find information, do you know how to validate it, do you know how to synthesize it, do you know how to leverage it, do you know how to communicate it, do you know how to collaborate with it, do you know how to problem-solve with it? That’s the new 21st century set of literacies, and it looks a lot different than the model most of us were raised under.” 

I would say they do, they are and they will!