The Modern Student

What has fundamentally changed is the impact of architecture and technology, both at the structural level of newly built educational institutions and in the everyday life of students.

Some essential elements of student life continue as they did in yesteryear.  The uncertainty students have about what they are going to do after they leave school is no different to how it was nearly four decades ago. 

The belief that a particular professor is highly important to the lives of students is no different, there is still a movement for students to head towards those who bring certainty to their lives and away from people who bring uncertainty.  Ironically I actually fall into the latter group, because I sometimes forget that these students have not undergone the experience I now take for granted. 

In the area of technology, the principal change has been embracing technologies that extend what students already do, so FaceTime extends face to face conversations, Snapchat is an extension of exchanges that happen in the moment.  Older people tend to collect those moments, while young students simply see themselves extending out relationships with their friends when they are not around physically. 

Students still incur the same anxieties as they have always done and the same competitive realities, even if the scale of that competition may be greater due to ease of communication and the ease of collaboration to reduce event times to hours rather than days or weeks.

Only a handful of students I know have heard of beBee and that solely from me.  A few students enjoy reading thoughts because they are also self-reflective in nature, but they tend not to want to make write out reflections in a public space.   Even though they use a public space to create personal conversations, they tend to trust the technology and not think too much or mostly not at all at the fact that each interaction on a technology platform helps an organization identify behaviours and create predictions around that behaviour for market purposes.

Above all, when I go to college to pursue my learning journey, or when I think out aloud online like my journey here at beBee, this is my life.  In that way I utilize beBee in a similiar principle that young students use Snapchat.  beBee enables me a place to think out aloud, while mobile technologies enable the existing relationships between students to scale online like offline.

The common bond between all students are in what they study and how much they give to their studies.  Since my college is where the business school is located, students can get into business study  but there study is often linked to a curriculum which is based on models and theories that have established themselves over time.  So they learn about project and managerial techniques, rather than actual leadership and actual management.  The techniques mean that they develop a high level sense of trust with their academic advisors.

Another similarity that has not changed is the diversity of capability.  That range between really bright students and average students continues to find its way onto traditional social media grounds.  We continue to see the team group photo of students celebrating a particular milestone in their group.  I also see that what they learn is often a few or even many years behind where the finest or top notch are.  Students accept the mastery of their professors in the same way they embrace the thought leader that has a reasoned point of view. 

The sound of kowtowing and people pleasing in front of authority remains despite living in an age where many topics such as the business landscape are considered to be a part of a "disruptive process".  Whenever I see a professor miss out customer value, I don't have to alert them to the fact, because for many adults authority and not leadership is the prevailing mindset.  These professors are not invested in knowing that leadership is different from authority.  In meetings where real world experience hits head on with base theory, real world experience should win out, but if the frame is leaving the student to trust a broken system.

The educational system is not broken because of insufficient funds, but because most students do not notice the amount of special interests competing for resources whether they are unions, board, trustee's, politicians advising on technology (which can be a rather dull experience) etc

As a student my studies are about my life.  Fundraising and charity contain elements of giving back, but if students are giving back solely because that is what "good people" do, then there is no principal change in the collective student body.  The only difference is that corporations know how to tap into these resources and that is where the lure of maybe getting a job with them, keeps students following the enticement. 

At the same time they end up in programs that put them into a square box and used problem solving techniques that are ancient and lack the speed that modern digital processes operate at.  This means they also lack that mindset that is more agile and highly adaptive.  Moreover the biggest consideration is that a student who is 18 will be different when they are 3 years older and far different a person when they reach into early adult phase of their life. 

If the problems they are given are formulaic and textbook in nature, what these students learn is how to be formulaic and when later they are in a work situation, they have not been exposed to how the mind adapts to 21st Century practice.  Knowing that leadership, management and even public speaking is a practice, anything that is formulaic will only delay the average students exposure to uncertainty.  Then the problem of learned helplessness creeps in, and the life led on social media tends to be just as predictable, so some students seek greater risk because they are not taught to think out-aloud, they are taught to follow the schools behavior code.

Just because a person is a modern student, does not mean they are instantly good at social media or technological reasoning.  A modern student therefore can be modern in a 20th Century rather than embrace the opportunities and relative abundance of 21st Century resource.   Yes, they are far more practical with online platforms but even here, the amount time they spend on superficial sites simply mirrors the same distractions students of my generation had with newly created computer games and sitting in front of the boob-tube.

In summary the modern student adapts to technology in a practical manner, that they are blind to when learning about leadership and management as theoretical constructs.  If practice, practice, practice was yesterday's calling, it remains true to the calling of the modern student.

What modern technology has done is made the learning space open and yet even though the students I interact with should know that, they continue to be obedient to the ways that have always been the ways of traditional education.  

The first step is to recognize the modern student and here this is why I make the distinction between a modern student and a 21st Century practitioner and hence what is not fundamentally understood as my "learning journey", ironically even by the very students I now meet in an established college of learning.  So it is I say that there young bodies in old minds, and young minds in old bodies - so age is not a factor in what a modern student is, but the conditioning is.