May 8, 2008...4:51 am
New Business Environment. New MBA.
Young people today are frequently criticized as being illiterate because they can’t sit still long enough to read or write a 40 page paper. Yet this simplistic observation doesn’t hold up upon closer examination. Web browsing, email, chat, text messages, and many video games all depend on text. We are reading and writing more than ever, and young people are at the front of this trend. It’s just that the content read and produced is occurring asynchronously, and in multiple streams. The traditional book, one page at a time, one page after another, endlessly, doesn’t fit with today’s learner. We want multiple streams of information, to pick and choose, to assimilate, aggregate and reflect upon what is useful.
Yale School of Business gets this. They have been developing a new case study method which forgoes the traditional lengthy case study method and replaces it with an online “raw case” which presents multiple data streams, in various formats, in obscenely large amounts. The students then decide how to interact with the material to make the most of the data–much of it in real time. The Dean writes:
No longer linear, but instead lateral, in their thought processes, they seem to think in hyperlinks, assembling information from multiple simultaneous inputs. In the 1990s, scholars and teachers interpreted this lateral mindset as a kind of intellectual laziness, but now, my colleagues and I are increasingly of the view that the students of today are actually quite focused and energetic.
They are willing to devote considerable effort to wade through vast amounts of material from disparate sources; they may even work harder than students of a few decades ago. They just don’t want to focus on any one piece of material (say a 50-page article or a 20-page case) for a considerable period of time.
I’ll be sending them my application come December.
References:
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6441.shtml
Grant McCracken at: http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2008/05/the-business-ca.html
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