Beloit College Mindset List Announced through Webcast

The class of 2012 will obviously have some different norms and grounds working for them as it has emerged in a digital era ruled by computers and rapid ways of communication. It’s only natural that these students will hardly be aware of the availability of telephones in their rooms since the landlines rarely came to meet their needs as they were teenagers. Cell phones and texting of different kinds will be at the core of their interaction with one another. Regardless they have ever shared a bedroom, these students will be genuine filemates, knowing everything there is to know about file sharing and, of course, looking to find out personal things about each other on Facebook

Beloit College today announced its 11th annual Mindset List via webcast using Mediasite by Sonic Foundry, the renowned market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, Marketwatch reports. It seems that for the first time those who put together the list (which is now the most popular back to school topic in higher education) will launch discussions about the cultural implication and educational aspects of this turning points set in the exclusive webcast.

The ones “responsible” for the Mindset List are Tom McBride, Keefer Professor of the Humanities and Ron Nief, director of public affairs at Beloit College who came up with this is a set of criterions that give a profile to the lives of Gen Y students entering college this fall. Parents, current students, faculty, all have contributed to the collecting of material mostly by emailing ideas and doing a lot of research of various media – from Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal – published around the time these students were born.

Nief stressed the importance of having a point of reference in a world caught more than ever in the hunger for progress but also for multiculturalism: "We create this list each year as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for each new generation entering college. The mindset of these students is quite different than the faculty who are about to prepare them to become the leaders of tomorrow. As the list changes each year so does our means of distributing it. We're pleased that this year represents our first webcast using Mediasite."

Additionally, McBride pointed more towards the amusing side of the list: "The list is terrific for a chuckle, terrific if you have a mildly masochistic need to feel old and it's terrific in giving you a snapshot of what's happened in the last 18 years," he said. "It's also a nice snapshot of the attitudes and events of entering college students."

Here are some highlights of the 11th Annual Beloit College Mindset List; for these students:

- Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddie
Krueger have always been dead.
- Harry Potter could be a classmate playing on their Quidditch team.
- Since they were in diapers, karaoke machines have always been annoying
people at parties.
- They've always been looking for Carmen Sandiego and GPS satellite
navigation systems have always been available.

You can find the webcast at http://www.beloit.edu/mindsetwebcast.