Everyone who makes a living online needs to know what the web will be like in the future. Projecting from statistics showing current trends, researchers can make educated guesses, but you don’t want to base your business decisions on nothing but statistics. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I offer something even better: Have a look at the habits and preferences of tomorrows online customers.

In my day job, I am a learning technology adviser at the University of Oslo. That means I am working to ensure that the students have the technological infrastructure they need to support their learning strategies. Here are three cases I use to explain to my colleagues how teenagers live and learn online. And these teenagers are the consumers of tomorrow.

Learning in virtual networks

Some months ago I heard Anne Kirah, lead design anthropologist at Microsoft present what she calls real people data, qualitative data about ‘real people’: She lives with a family for days, observes their tasks, logs how they solve them and how technology helps or hinders them.

In France, she met a teenage boy who wanted a new, cool snowboard for Christmas. His parents told him it was too expensive and asked him to come up with an alternative.

The boy was a snowboard enthusiast and it turned out he had an international network of quite knowledgeable peers. He contacted them in forums and on his messenger to ask for advice. Together they found an online store that sold the same snowboard for a more reasonable price. It was still very expensive, though, so they compiled a list of arguments for why this was the right purchase: Quality, safety and durability.

The boy got the cool snowboard. Then he and his parents had a conversation about networking. They had been concerned that he was wasting time in the online networks instead of spending time with what they called his ‘real’ friends. The case of the snowboard had convinced them that his online networks were arenas for learning as well as fun and games.

Digitally augmented students
At the Online Educa conference in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, I attended a session called Learning in the digital world of teenagers. Researchers Guus Wijngaards and Gunnar Brückner orchestrated a conversation with a panel of five teenagers (17 to 19 years old) about their online habits at school and at home.

They all had MySpace and Facebook accounts for networking. They used mobile phones, Skype and Windows Live Messenger for communication. More and more, though, they had their conversations on Skype and used their phones mostly for taking snapshots and recording video.

When researching a subject, their starting point was often Wikipedia, but they were aware that these articles can be biased and always supplemented their research with a Google search and/or a cellulose based encyclopedia.

One student had spent last year in the UK at a school where all the students had laptop computers in the classroom. He had enjoyed sitting in the back of the class to see what was on their computer screens. They had messengers and web cams active and would discuss the topic (and other topics, too…) while they listened to the teacher.

The tribe of the tentacled digital natives

The impression of the digitally augmented students is reinforced by an interview at The Infinite Thinking Machine with “Arthus”, a 14 year old student from Vermont. He is by no means an average student or an average user of web technology, but he is very young and has a firm grip on most kinds of web technology. He might very well be the shape of things to come.

“Arthus” has a cell phone, but he doesn’t text. He doesn’t watch TV, but watches some NBC shows online. He listens to his iPod all the time. Outside of school he spends several hours a day on the computer. Still, he feels that his life is in balance: He does school clubs and he feels comfortable turning off the computer to do other things.

His school has a good number of computers, and even though they buy new computers every couple of years, they are not used actively in the classroom. This makes “Arthus” feel that when students come to school their “technology tentacles” are cut off.

His argument is that: “If teachers are worried about the use of laptops in class for things that aren’t related to class, then maybe teachers should be thinking about why students wouldn’t be paying attention. [...] It’s not a given that students will pay attention if you are not talking about something they care about. [...] The current learning system–one task, one person teaching–will just not be relevant in the future. And it’s not reflective of what college or work life are like. The education system owes it to students to prepare them for that world.”

Prosumer or digital octopus?

A year ago, Time Magazine announced “You” person of the year–that is, if you contribute content to the web through sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and other Web 2.0 sites.

Time was right to declare we are witnessing a media revolution. Their thesis (shared by many others) is that media consumers are now also media producers. And so the phrase “prosumer” was coined. A year has passed, though, and we have seen that the number of visitors to sites like YouTube ans Wikipedia that actually produce content is very low (around 1 percent, according to Jakob Nielsen).

I am convinced that the prosumer is not representative, even though I am one myself Even the digital natives in the cases above do not produce much. The web is still not a publishing medium for them. Yet it is more than a means of communication. It is a place to find and a means to organize information. The web user of tomorrow will not primarily be a producer of content, she will collect, organize and re-distribute it.

To the digitally literate teenagers we have met, the web is and extension of their classroom, their bookshelf, their living room. In many ways they perceive the web as a natural extension of themselves: Though PCs, mobil phones, iPods and other gadgets, they are online when they want to and where they want to. They have grown digital tentacles that they use to gather, organize and share information. They are true digital natives in that they can actually be said to live online.