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This year’s Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, hosted by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, was a welcome shift from the sometimes adversarial tone present during previous annual meetings. The representatives present from both the educational and business worlds seemed, in many ways, to collectively recognize the weight and speed of the transformation we are all experiencing. Rather than business leaders wondering what is wrong with education, and vice versa, most of the conversations I heard took a wider, more holistic approach to the rapid shifts in communication that are creating new challenges and possibilities at an almost unimaginable rate.
During morning roundtable discussions, my group concluded that, in order to successfully navigate this rapidly shifting landscape of communicative channels, today’s college students will need to develop themselves into fundamentally adaptable creatures; that is, they will have to become proficient in both rhetorical and technical flexibility. Learning only a few forms of communication (written and oral, for instance) just isn’t going to cut it anymore. As an example, it’s clear that students need to become more comfortable switching between casual digital interactions like text messages to the more formal writing practices required of, say, professional letter writing. While developing this ability, they must simultaneously prepare to apply these practices to a whole host of communicative technologies that haven’t even been invented yet.
Our group decided to create a series of classroom exercises designed to develop this adaptability, settling on a series of in-class role-playing activities that ask students to summarize the same text (like a newspaper article) in different communicative registers. A brief article about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, might first be summarized as a brief blog post, then again as a Tweet, and finally re-envisioned as a YouTube video. Our brainstorming helped me envision this “adaptability,” or the ability to confidently shift between different registers of communication, as a fundamental skill for students to develop if they hope to negotiate an ever-expanding set of expressive outlets. In this sense, this year’s Symposium served to reveal that, in both the business and educational realms, there is a growing realization of the profound ways that technology is changing how we communicate, and that future generations will be contending with a landscape of expressive possibilities far more complex than anything human beings have ever experienced. College students of the 21st century, much like the traditional institutions in which they are embedded, will do well to recognize this fact, and prepare to adjust themselves and their skill sets accordingly, again and again and again…
