ICYMI – October 1, 2013
If you are like me you try to read as many articles, blogs and books as possible but just cannot catch all of them. “In Case You Missed It” is my way of pointing out a few “reads” that I think are too good to miss.
Technology and the College Generation – Courtney Rubin
As a professor who favors pop quizzes, Cedrick May is used to grimaces from students caught unprepared. But a couple of years ago, in his class on early American literature at the University of Texas at Arlington, he said he noticed “horrible, pained looks” from the whole class when they saw the questions.
He soon learned that the students did not know he had changed the reading assignment because they did not check their e-mail regularly, if at all. To the students, e-mail was as antiquated as the spellings “chuse” and “musick” in the works by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards that they read on their electronic books.
“Some of them didn’t even seem to know they had a college e-mail account,” Dr. May said. Nor were these wide-eyed freshmen. “This is considered a junior-level class, so they’d been around,” he said.
That is when he added to his course syllabuses: “Students must check e-mail daily.” Dr. May said the university now recommends similar wording.
The Best Dressed Generation
Alonso Mateo has almost 57,000 followers on Instagram, has been profiled by New York Magazine, and is considered by some to be an online style icon. He is five years old. Though Alonso’s style and online fame are impressive, he is not alone in his pint-sized style icon status. Children with better style than most adults are filling up Tumblrs like “Children With Swag” and “Kids Dressed Better Than You.” (Spoiler alert, they are.) These days, Osh-Kosh-B’Gosh just won’t do for a growing number of Plural kids, who are growing up in a market that might just be making them the best-dressed generation.
Think you know Millennials? Think again.
We at Ypulse have been studying Millennials for nine years, quite some time before the current zeitgeist of mass interest in the generation. Yet after years of talking about Millennials, sweeping generalizations and stereotypes are still ruling much of the conversation. We hear it on morning shows, see it on the covers of magazines: all Millennials are entitled, narcissistic, coddled, naively optimistic, and lazy. But the reality, which we see here every day in our research on the generation and in conversations with thousands of Millennials, is that not all Millennials are alike. A group of 80 million people cannot be painted with one brush, and it’s time to take a deeper look at who they really are. We segmented Millennials to get a better understanding of the differences and uniqueness that exists within the generation. Here is what we found:
