generation 1989

How do you teach history, and what is the time frame of what you can expect people to know?
I felt old today. i am meant to be teaching historical research methods to two classes of 18 year olds. For the occasion, I have given them each a different east European city, which they will be studying the whole term. I chose smaller cities, to force them to dig around a bit more for material.
On the first class, none of them had heard of the cities I assigned to them. Today their assignment was to, in small groups, tell the others what they had found out about their place. Every single kid had used the same “source”: wikipedia.
This was fine, in fact it was what I expected. So then I took them to the computer lab and gave them 15 minutes to check their city out on a digital journal database, followed by another 15 minutes looking at the times digital archive. Then I asked them what they had learned flipping through.
Tom: “dude, there was like a war in mostar and they killed lots of people and blew up a bridge.”
Alex: “no way man, there was a war in Dubrovnik too, these other guys called serbs bombed the whole fucking place.”
Sylvia: “there was like a revolution in my city!” (timisoara)
Paul: “there are FOUR football teams in Sofia!”
I was at first surprised that this was news: I remember all of these events happening quite clearly. But then I calculated that my entire class was born in 1989. They were infants when the berlin wall fell, some of them weren’t even born yet. They were toddlers during the Bosnian war. Their first historical memory is iraq. They are a totally different generation.