Does this sound familiar? Only weeks into their first year of medical school, our students are doing what comes naturally – setting up their own freewheeling blog about their courses, rating their professors online, Twittering about their lectures and lecturers, and sharing proprietary online course content with friends across the globe. Meanwhile faculty are worried that their PowerPoint slides will be stolen off the school’s curriculum website, while at the same time attendance at lectures is falling to less than one-third of the class.

The Millennial Generation or those born beginning in the eighties, grew up with the web and are armored with free and easy-to-use personal social networking technologies. They bring both new expectations and new risks to school. Rather than stifle students' creative use of social media and networking and scare away faculty, there are ways to use web technology safely and effectively. Already there are examples of faculty using blogs, wikis, and adaptive virtual patients to extend and replace traditional methods. Just as Web 2.0 tools like YouTube and Facebook enable millennials to share self-generated content and create their own online experiences, these new technologies can be leveraged to make learning more participatory and individualized. What some may see as a threat to the status quo can be a catalyst for a learner-centric curricular change.

Through examples, this session will invite educators to view communication and learning from the perspective of a millennial student and introduce concrete methods to both enhance the learning experience and mitigate the risks associated with open, accessible web technologies.