Generation NeXt
Friday, May 11th, 2007
UF is hosting the SEED Conference 2007. The keynote speaker for the first day was Mark Taylor and his topic was Generation NeXt Comes To College.
He defined Generation NeXt as people born to Generation X parents. I think I’m in that group. My parents are Baby Boomers. Taylor talked about how these generational cohorts interact with each other.
Gen NeXt students are wired. Each day they consume 8.5 hours of media in 6.5 hours (they multi-task). They all have cell phones and many can text message without looking at the keys. They also rely on their parents a lot. Taylor talked of one study that showed 80% of these college students talked to their parents on the cell phone yesterday.
Coincidently, last night at the dinner table my wife was talking about students she interviewed for a GA position at her University. When each of the candidates was asked if he/she was familiar with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the responses were all the same. “I’ve used them since I first started to read.”
She then said something that surprised me even more and gave me a flashback of the keynote by Taylor. She pointed out an article that said current college graduates were being invited to job interviews… along with their parents. The employer wants to make sure the parents play a roll in decision. That’s just weird.
During the average day, how many times do you use a web based form? If you login to anything on the web, you see a dialog box like the one at the right. After typing in your username, do you use your mouse to navigate to the password box? Don’t ever do that again. Instead, press the Tab key one time. This will move the cursor from the current text box to the next text box.