I’m beginning to think that I’m witnessing the end of education. The suspicion first arose when, in early 2008, Ryerson accused a first-year computer engineering student named Chris Avenir of cheating. Avenir was the administrator of a Facebook group called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions, through which he and 146 of his peers discussed homework assignments. When one of Avenir’s professors discovered the group, he reported it to Ryerson’s student conduct officer, alleging that students were sharing answers to assignments they’d been asked to complete individually. The students claimed they were merely discussing problem-solving techniques, as they often did in study groups. Avenir was given a failing grade in the course, charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct—one for running the group and one for each of its members—and threatened with expulsion. The incident received international media attention. Were the students cheating or were they just learning in a very 2008 fashion? The drama of the controversy was heightened by the fact that it took place at Ryerson, a school that prides itself on being technologically advanced; the school’s ambitious president, Sheldon Levy, envisions the campus as part of a future downtown “digital hub.”

To me, it seemed like a straightforward case of cheating. I agreed with James Norrie, Ryerson’s then-director of the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, who said at the time, “Our academic misconduct code says that if work is to be done individually and students collaborate, that’s cheating, whether it’s by Facebook, fax or mimeograph.” And yet, the students were convinced they had done nothing wrong and argued that Ryerson was violating their civil rights by shutting them down. It appears they believed their virtual lives, like the Web itself, should be entirely free from regulation. (Coincidentally, at the time of the incident, Ryerson was in the midst of updating its student code of conduct to cover on-line actions.) After a hearing in March 2008, the engineering faculty appeals committee found that Avenir wasn’t party to cheating and restored his passing grade, although it did place a disciplinary notation on his transcript.

In the year or so since—which is eons in the digital age—I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenge of educating the iGeneration. When I started teaching communications at Ryerson three years ago, I was 28 years old—not that much older than my upper-year students. I’m addicted to my BlackBerry—which, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I check regularly in the middle of the night while lying in bed—and even as I write this sentence, I am concur­rently using Twitter and Facebook. In other words, I’m the furthest thing from a Luddite.

But the more time I spend with my students, the more I have begun to feel that in the decade separating us, technology has changed daily life so radically that our world views differ in irreconcilable ways.

So for the past few months, I’ve been trying to decide if what I see in my classroom is just your typical generational change—the kind that every generation complains about—or if something more seismic is going on. I now believe that today’s students are, for the most part, ill-suited to a university education, and that the fissure that currently exists between schools and students is unbridgeable.