A post on the Writing Everyday Works blog I follow intrigued me because of its title: What generation are you? What generation are your co-workers? Does it influence your point of view?
Baby boomers, Gen X’ers, Digital natives, or generations in between (like mine) all have a different view of the world. So I went on to read the post, which takes you to this interesting article from the Walls Street Journal, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500. In a nutshell: how do corporations need to change in order to attract and retain workers from the Facebook Generation?
It lists 12 “work-relevant characteristics of online life.” I find some of it interesting, some of it right on, and some of it downright scary (hackers are heroes?)! The one characteristic that has fascinated me in recent years is that “power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.” With the Creative Commons and all, so much is shared on the web, for free, that it often makes me wonder “How can these people make a living if they give away all their thinking and work?” I suppose they use their noteriety to sell bigger and better ideas?
The author, Gary Hamel, explains that “to gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch—and garner the credit that might have been yours. Online, there are a lot of incentives to share, and few incentives to hoard.” As a teacher, I see in this the promise of cooperative learning we try to teach children: by working together we can help each other reach larger goals. On the teacher front, we are also (for the most part) great at sharing lessons and strategies with new teachers on our teams, and increasingly, we share across the web. But we’re not all ready to say: “Sure take my stuff--which took me hours of work to create--and use it!”
On Thursday, I organized a workshop for 90 teachers. One of the presenters reluctantly agreed to sharing her PowerPoint on our website but only after adding a copyright warning on every slide, basically asking people to not share her work. On the other hand, another presenter sent me every single file and example shown to post on the web so others could adapt her work as they see fit. Quite a striking difference! Some are in it to make money (the first presenter mentioned is starting her own company) while others reap different benefits. Which generation do you think these two teachers belonged to?
