Educating the Net Generation and What To Do About Printed Publications?

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Educating the Net Generation and What To Do About Printed Publications?

1/18/2006

By Terry Calhoun

The ELI is not alone in focusing on the student and learning. Quite a few other professional organizations, including SCUP, whose membership is not overwhelmingly professorial, have refocused at least a part of their professional development efforts on the impact of what their members do on student learning. At SCUP, although we have a good many budget and resource planners, as well as architects and physical facilities planners and IT folks, we consider the academic plan the structure on which all other planning should take place. It's why we're all on campus in the first place.

Diana spoke at the closing plenary session at SCUP's 40th Annual, International Conference and Learning Marketplace last July. A lot of what she presented, in a very moving experience for our members, is within the scope of this new book. She was speaking to an audience that many people might think is fairly removed from the hands-on issues relating to learning, but you could have heard a pin drop in the room during her pauses.

If you're an experienced conference-g'er, you know that the late morning closing plenary brunch session is often one where many of the several hundred in attendance bring their luggage, and presentations are often interrupted by people getting up, saying goodbye to friends at the table, and heading out for the airport. Frankly, it's something I worry about each year. Since I read up on the topic of who our students are regularly, and also employ several undergraduate work-study students, I didn't focus on Diana's speech so much as on the audience and its reaction. I don't think a single person left the room while she was at the podium. These people want to understand their customers!

I made an interesting observation during this time. Because I was watching the audience, and sometimes Diana, I was able to see that nearly 100 percent of the audience was watching the large screens with her slide show on them rather than watching the speaker, even when a slide had been up for a while: clear evidence that this generation did grow up with television. :-)

Education the Net Generation is a must-read. Without negating its value, though, as a practicing association management professional, what I want is the book or the road map, right now that tells me how to keep a publications program solvent--and even make it a net revenue generator for organizational sustainability--as we get from here/now to there/when the Net Generation constitutes the Society for College and University Planning's membership.

If you know where that book or road map is, please let me know.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Educating the Net Generation and What To Do About Printed Publications?," Campus Technology, 1/18/2006, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40695

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