The Concord Consortium

At the NSDL Annual Meeting last week, we got to see the usual great lineup of opening and closing speakers. One of the regulars by now at this meeting is Julie Evans, from Project Tomorrow. They do the great annual Speak Up surveys of schools that really tell us how students and teachers are using the Internet and what emerging technologies.

One of the major take-aways from the talk (though there were many) was her profile of the new learner that they’re seeing emerge. They call this student the “free-agent learner,” and see a number of characteristics in these students, including:

Self-directed learning

Untethered to traditional education

Expert at personal data aggregation

Understand the power of connections

Create new communities

Not tethered to physical networks

Are spurred by experiential learning

Are content developers, rather than just consumers

Find the process of learning as important as the knowledge gained

Do these describe anyone you know? The average person that Project Tomorrow is identifying as a free-agent learner is a middle school student, but they may exist in your workplace, among your teaching staff, or even in your house. There is plenty more to say about the fascinating findings from this annual survey, so future posts may dive into some of the implications of this trend for digital learning. Do you notice any of these trends? What do you think they mean for our design or use of emerging technologies for education? Let us know in the comments.

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