Review of "Connecting to the net.generation: What higher education professionals need to know about today's students"

For those of us college administrators who came of age in that (not so) long-ago era before the Internet, and who (perhaps) are still struggling to master web browsing and even email, dealing with computer technologies and the issues they raise can seem an almost hopelessly daunting task. This is not to say that we (necessarily) are “old fogeys.” Given the extraordinary speed of Internet developments, even people who have not yet reached the untrustworthy age of 30 can count themselves among this group. As one court aptly put it, “in the Internet environment,” a single year is the equivalent of “several generations, if not an eternity” (Earthweb, 1999). Seemingly every week brings with it the announcement of some new such technology that is both child’s play and irresistibly tempting to our students, but mind-numbingly confusing to the rest of us: blogs; wikis; social networking sites; virtual worlds; yet another variation on file sharing; or some other equally bewildering, and frequently even unpronounceable, gizmo or doohickey.