Playing by the rules

Anthropologist Mizuko Ito studies the digital natives for future employers. What makes these youngsters highly interesting candidates yet demanding at the same time? They are all used to success but they expect slight changes in the workplace.

Mizuko Ito likes setting things straight – particularly outdated notions that are said to be scientific. She explains: “For around a hundred years, psychologists and education experts thought children could not master complexity.” But you only have to watch today’s six to 12 year-olds playing real-life or virtual games, for example the incredibly popular Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh* trading cards, to see that kids can learn to strategically use up to 500 different character cards in a very short time. Now if that isn’t complex…

Ito, a social anthropologist and child-development specialist, is a leading international expert when it comes to the deployment of mobile technology in everyday life. At various research institutes, including Keio private university in Tokyo and the University of South California, she studies the effects of digital, interactive communications technology on children and young adults. To develop her theories on mobile, independent learning (handheld learning) in the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s interdisciplinary research network, she studied thousands of chats, blogs and tweets. And she also contacted and played games with young digital natives to find out how their social behavior differs to that of adults. Ito simply signs her posts Mimi.

Only the tools are new

As the 41-year-old explains, “There are not really any huge contrasts between the present generation that is growing up with telecommunications and social networks and the pre-Internet generation. The real difference lies in the tools available to today’s youngsters to construct and develop their own roles and identities. Children learn at least as quickly and effectively via the Internet using mentors they appoint themselves as they do in their real-world environments, i.e. from teachers at school.” Instead of through pen pals or face-to-face interaction, kids are hunting out similar people with similar interests online, comparing and contrasting talents and learning from them. “Peer-based knowledge sharing where youngsters exchange large proportions of the knowledge they have already acquired helps children learn from their social networks on an ongoing basis. And it predestines them to be ideal participants in collaboration networks in the future – an important tool for businesses.”

A new generation of workers

Mimi Ito sees the ease and self-confidence with which kids use social networks and the skilled way six-year-olds master computer games as indicators of the sort of employees companies can expect in the future.
For her, a key difference between these youngsters and the digital immigrants they will meet at the office is that the former have a new attitude toward information: they expect it to be available anytime and anywhere.
Whether it’s Wikis, blogs, new URLs, or role-based rights – people who have grown up adapting to new events, challenges and instructions will find it easier to keep their skills up to date by using digital processes and virtual collaboration. For Ito, the fact that older workers often need conventional classroom training is a definite disadvantage of digital immigrants.
Initiative, determination and decisiveness are great attributes for potential employers. “Young people just need to apply what they learnt in their childhood and youth,” says Ito.

Part two of article