CollegeHumor shows us what happens when Carmen Sandiego grows up:

Gen-Xers: today’s college student is talking about the TV show, not the video game.

Categories: Funny, Generations, Video Games
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If the information economy is driven by the young, and it’s millenials who are saturated with the share-your-life-with-everyone world of the internet, why are most of the blogs I read written by old people, either Boomers or late Gen-Xers? Some hypotheses:

1. Young people aren’t very good writers yet, so nobody wants to read them. Older bloggers have had decades to refine their writing, and practice makes it better. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you can’t communicate them well.
2. Older people have more to say. They’ve spent decades accumulating experience, usually in a specific area (economics, human resources, technology), and that makes their opinions more valuable. It also gives them a greater bank of stories to share from, tempers their ideas with a knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in the real world, and most importantly, lends them credibility on an internet that’s something pretty scarce.
3. Good blogs have focus, and young people don’t. Millennials are still trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives through some magical personal quest that nobody cares about. It makes their blogs tough to follow. Boomer blogs have a single cohesive idea that attracts those who are interested and keeps them tuning in.

After the recent lapse in posting, prepare for some changes in this blog. Cohesive idea: making better decisions.

Categories: Generations, Social Software, Technology
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Data from the latest National Health Interview Survey suggests that the land line is becoming a thing of the past. Yahoo news has a summary:

One in four people aged 18 to 24 had only cell phones, as did 29 percent of those aged 25 to 29, the study showed. The percentages declined with age after that, with 2 percent of those 65 or over having only cell phones.

The group most likely to have only a cell phone are young people with low incomes. Studies on the subject still conclude that the cell-only population isn’t large enough to skew broad polls, but it certainly has an affect on segmentation, especially towards these target groups.

Categories: Generations, Polling, Technology
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When asked to review some E-Learning software, Ryan Healy tells it like it is:

Eventually, I replied and told her that I hate all e-learning.

She said that most millennials she works with dislike e-learning. So, she only designs e-learning tools that are coupled with personal teaching and discussion.

After mentioning my desire to write a post about doing away with e-learning, J.T gave me some great insight. She told me, “It helps save companies thousands in training costs.”

E-learning doesn’t help companies save money, it helps them lower costs. There’s a difference, because e-learning is effectively wasted dollars. It lets HR and corporate training departments fill their checkbox requirements (”Look, so-and-so should know that, they took the e-learning). Most e-learning programs are just a booklet divided up into sections that they make you click through, followed by an inanely simple and irrelevant quiz. Better to just make a web page and let people read it how they want and when they want. The most effective e-learning I’ve ever seen wasn’t even traditional e-learning. It was just a group of links that said “Want to know more about ____? Click here.” For people who needed more information, it gave it to them, and for everyone else, it didn’t waste their time.

Ryan is right, it’s not just Millennials who hate e-learning, everyone does. It’s a waste of time. Putting a generational qualifier there is a cop-out, and it sounds like the consultant peddling it is using it as an excuse. “Yes, some people hate e-learning, but those are Millenials and we don’t understand them anyways.”

Note: After writing this, I realized I used on-line tutorials for computer programming, like those at http://www.w3schools.com, fairly extensively, but I don’t think they fall into what people think of when they hear ‘e-learning’.

Categories: Education, Generations
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