I found this article by Don Tapscott at Edge: The Third Culture through a tweet by Brad Boydston, and want to throw it out here for a conversation. Essentially, he argues the idea that the current generations learning style, absorbed as it is through internet culture and learning, at variance with current teaching styles. If you can wade through his incredibly misinformed stereotype and simplistic alternatives, he does get to the bottom of some serious issues.

Universities
are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably
becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container
and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile
on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there
is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big
universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up
digital best learn.

The old-style
lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large
group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses.
It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and
the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students,
who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently.
Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on
the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation,
not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast
one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or
even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities,
and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their
peril.

Check out the responses, too.