REWIRED REVIEWS
"This book offers insight and help to motivate and maximize learning for the Internet Generation. Rosen offers invaluable guidance, support, and ideas for parents and teachers" -- Eric Milou, Professor of Mathematics, Rowan University
************************************************************
“Larry Rosen's pioneering work in this field has been well-recognized by his professional colleagues - those of us in the field who are seeking to help educators, policy-makers, and parents understand what is happening as our society and our youth embrace digital media technologies. Larry's research-based, positive, proactive messages are a welcome relief from the unsupported fear-based messages that are unfortunately also present. Rewired should be considered a ‘must-read’ by all professionals who work with youth, especially those in leadership positions.” -- Nancy Willard, Director of The Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use
************************************************************
ME, MYSPACE, AND I REVIEWS
"Dr. Larry Rosen goes beyond the sensational headlines by providing original research on how young people are actually using MySpace. Me, MySpace, and I provides parents with a much needed voice in the debate over the role of social networking in the lives of today's totally wired teens." -- Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online
************************************************************
"Rosen brings his expertise as both a research psychologist and father together in this new book, Me. MySpace, and l. He provides great insight and excellent guidance." -- Nancy E. Willard, author of Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People learn to Make Safe and Responsible Choices Online
************************************************************
"A must read book for parents ... Guided by extensive research, presented in easy-to-read language and offering real-life examples, Dr. Rosen's book will enlighten parents. It helps bridge the generation divide between parents and their technologically literate kids." -- Scott Plunkett, Ph.D., Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, California State University Northridge
************************************************************
"Dr. Rosen brings insights, humor, and a balanced approach to how parents can understand and deal with this particularly challenging phenomenon. An enjoyable, authoritative, and practical book for today's parents!"— Kerby T. Alvy, Ph.D. Founder and Executive Director, Center for the Improvement of Child Caring
************************************************************
"Dr. Rosen's book is a very timely and comprehensive look at the virtual world. Me, MySpace, and I is groundbreaking and presents important issues for children and their parents coping in today's technological world. It is a practical handbook for parents and provides concrete answers to their most pressing questions about social networking and how children live online. Written by one of the top authorities on the impact of technology and combining theory, research, and common sense advice in easy-to-read language, Me, MySpace, and I is a must read for all parents." -- Dr. Kimberly Young, author of Caught in the Net and Tangled in the Weband director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery
************************************************************
Press Release:
"Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation” Helps Parents Keep Kids Safe in Cyberspace
California Educator
“We are, as teachers, Digital Immigrants who are trying to teach Digital Natives.” Larry Rosen believes that education is currently at a crossroads and facing a “culture gap” because today’s generation is so very different from those who teach them. “It’s difficult right now, because we have lots of teachers who have not grown up with technology teaching students who eat, sleep and breathe technology. So we have to adjust our ways of teaching them.”
Because they are accustomed to multitasking, says Rosen, students should be able to do so in a classroom environment. They work better that way and don’t get bored, he explains. “Making these students sit in the classroom and ‘unitask’ is not what we should be doing. Have them look up information online during the lecture. Have a contest to see who can find the information the fastest or information to augment the lecture material. If it’s an exam or worksheet, let them listen to music on their iPods like they do at home. That’s what they are used to, because they never do homework without music and TV on.”
Rosen also encourages teachers to let students use outside resources and websites — such as Second Life, a virtual universe that offers users the ability to create their own world or visit worlds that others have created, such as Vassar College’s Sistine Chapel — and then have students write about their experiences and analyze them. Teachers, he says, have to meet the students on their level and allow them to use technology they are familiar with. “For assignments, have them text each other, text the teacher, blog, form groups and do Wikis, write together online in collaboration, and create a social network. It will engage them in what they are doing. Tap into their creativity and let them do video, audio, video gaming and post their writings online. I know a teacher who let her students create MySpace pages for characters in Hamlet. Students had pictures, video and text formatted in the style of what the person would have said in Shakespearean language. They loved it and were totally engaged.”
|
|
The New York Times ran an article on January 10th entitled The Children of Cyberspace which included the following quotes about my work and my thoughts:
"Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of the coming “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn,” has also drawn this distinction between what he calls the Net Generation, born in the 1980s, and the iGeneration, born in the ’90s and this decade. Now in their 20s, those in the Net Generation, according to Dr. Rosen, spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks. Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less. “They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” he said. “They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not.”
|
Taping for ABC
Nieman Reports (Harvard University) on Mini-Generations:
"As the pace of technological change accelerates, mini-generations are defined by their distinctive patterns of media use, levels of multitasking, and preferred methods of communication. Among these mini-generations, differences are also being found in their values as well as levels of social and political activism. Since Generation Xers (born between 1965 and 1979), we have seen a rapid emergence of two mini-generations, and maybe even a third. There is the young adult Net Geners (born between 1980 and 1989) followed by teen iGeners (born from 1990 to 1999), and the first generation born in the 21st century, yet unnamed and still too young to fully define."
"There are some things we are starting to find out about this yet-to-be-labeled generation. Nielsen’s texting data show an average of 1,164 monthly texts for children and preteens. And the popularity of preteen and child-based social networks (e.g., Club Penguin, Barbie Girls) and the dramatic changes in media (e.g., 3-D kids’ movies) lead us to believe that their ways of communicating and approach to getting and sharing information will be different from their teen siblings."
"How this generation adapts to technology—and the impact it has on family dynamics, on the classroom experience, and on what entertainment looks like and how it is consumed—is what I am focusing on in my current research. My last book, “Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation,” was written with parents in mind. My new book, “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn” is aimed at a different audience. It portrays teen lifestyles in the sea of technology and challenges parents and educators—and anyone, such as journalists, who might be looking for constructive ways to interact with this generation—to take this knowledge about the intersection of technology and learning and use it to find the most effective ways to teach and communicate."
|
|
REVIEW IN SCHOLASTIC PARENT AND
CHILD MAGAZINE
If you're clueless about your child's online world, check out this great resource for parenting the Net Generation.
REVIEW IN THE LIBRARY JOURNAL
Call them Millennials, Gen Yers, or MySpacers -- but pay attention! Millennials (those born after 1979) are different from their predecessors; not only do they use their time differently, but they seek to create content, are bored if not multitasking, are far from private, and are always online. Rosen offers a well-documented comparison between and among baby boomers (b. 1946-64), Gen Xers (b. 1965-1979), and Millennials -- their values, career goals, loyalties, workplace styles, and more. When not on social-networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, Millennials are IMing, conducting research online, visiting the virtual world Second Life, or playing video games -- sometimes all at the same time. Interestingly, Millennials also value their parents' opinions and are career- and college-focused, emotionally open, and very social. Rosen advises parents to be proactive and to learn how to avoid problems before they start -- e.g., by placing the family computer in a common area of the home, setting limits, using MySpace themselves, and talking with and listening to their kids even more. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
A longtime researcher on the impact of technology, Rosen says we are faced with a new breed of learners for whom doing more than one thing at a time is a way of life. “This is a generation that has multi-tasked from birth and that is what they do from morning to night,” he says. And that generation is now running headlong into an education system predicated on focusing on one thing at a time, a culture clash that’s producing bored students, unread textbooks and frustrated teachers. Students who complained about “death by lecture” now lament “death by PowerPoint” as their teacher’s grasp of technology lags their own. Rosen understands that many of today’s teachers were educated by long lectures and are intimidated by the fast-changing technologies that students take for granted and use hourly, including texting, which has now replaced face-to-face conversation as the No. 1 way teens communicate. But, the California State University professor says, “They didn’t develop this technology. We did. We made it easy for them to communicate in a multitude of ways. We should not be surprised that we give them a tool and they want to use it.”
|
USA Today
"The contrast between Millennials and this younger group was so evident to psychologist Larry Rosen of California State University-Dominguez Hills that he has declared the birth of a new generation in a new book, Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn, out next month. Rosen says the tech-dominated life experience of those born since the early 1990s is so different from the Millennials he wrote about in his 2007 book, Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation, that they warrant the distinction of a new generation, which he has dubbed the 'iGeneration.'"
"The technology is the easiest way to see it, but it's also a mind-set, and the mind-set goes with the little 'i,' which I'm taking to stand for 'individualized,' " Rosen says. "Everything is customized and individualized to 'me.' My music choices are customizable to 'me.' What I watch on TV any instant is customizable to 'me.'”
"Rosen says the iGeneration believes anything is possible. "If they can think of it, somebody probably has or will invent it," he says. "They expect innovation. They have high expectations that whatever they want or can use "will be able to be tailored to their own needs and wishes and desires, because everything is." Rosen says portability is key. They are inseparable from their wireless devices, which allow them to text as well as talk, so they can be constantly connected — even in class, where cellphones are supposedly banned."
|
|
