Summary:

Research on “digital natives” has shown that today‘s youngsters interact with one another, and the world, in ways that are different from the ways we did growing up. At the same time, the “millennials” are not unique, or alone, in their attempts to comply with so-called 21st-century-skill requirements. Their parents and teachers too are on a treadmill, and they too qualify as life-long-learners. In this paper, I suggest that the 21st-century ideals of new media literacy, life long learning, and online education (distant learning, MOOCs) can become a nuisance if pushed at the expense of people and place. Of particular significance in this regard are the ways today’s learners—and those in charge of their upbringing—navigate, position and pace themselves, and interact with each other in the settings they inhabit, however shortly or permanently. Learning everywhere and all the time is not a new idea, especially among progressive educators. Yet its unexamined uses by overly hurried or worried specialists call for a moment of pause. To be viable, our schools will need to be “edgeless” but they cannot be place-less! Students will have to be inter-connected yet without loosing their grounds. Lastly, educational institutions will have to rethink their “raison d’ètre” (place and identity) within a broader range of initiatives, platforms, and programs, all brought to the attention of growing numbers of [lifelong] learners in search of [short-term] options in an ever-changing flux of shifting opportunities.

Keywords: Millennials, Life-long-learners, 21st century skills, Educational settings, Places, Paths, Pace,