Dubnick, Melvin J., “Are we ready for the nomads?” Remarks prepared for panel presentation at NASPAA, Thursday, October 19, 2006, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Minneapolis, MN
“I would argue that few of us have gone far enough in our responses, and that the future of MPA programs on all three points — who we teach, what we teach and howwe teach — depends on our understanding not only demographic, technological or political trends, but also the social psychological trend involving the changing “mindset” of the generation that is now making its way into our market.
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“All this may sound like new age claptrap, and it might turn out to be just that. But thoseof us who plodded through Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media four decades ago will sense something quite familiar. At the end of that now classic work, McLuhan speaks to the future in terms of the emergence of individuals who, nurtured and educated on the new electronic media, will become “nomadic gatherers of knowledge” — people who, when they enter the economic mainstream, will engage in “learning a living” rather than earning a living.
“Don’t get me wrong — I am not one who sees McLuhan as prophet, and in many respects he got the timing and even the media wrong. But his insights in the closing paragraphs of Understanding Media are worth paying attention to, because I do think he gets the personality of the net-geners right. They are nomadic gatherers of knowledge, and they are our future. What they require — what they demand — of learning environments is that they be just that — environments in which they learn through a process of immersion. If they are the answer to “who we teach,” then we need to take their mindsets and their virtual cultures into account as we consider the content of what we teach and certainly how we teach.
“We can “muddle through” in the short term as this group matures.
“But the nomads are already at the gate.”