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Digital Natives

By Steve Draper,   Department of Psychology,   University of Glasgow.

This page is firstly to hold some web links on the topic of Digital Natives.

The most hysterical view is that young people growing up with current ICT are and act quite differently from older ones, and the universities are hopelessly out of tune with this.

At the other extreme, any university needs to track what ICT skills its incoming students have so as to readjust the IT training they get. Slightly more careful, is the view that new technology developments (e.g. Web 2.0, wikipedia, etc.) need to be examined continually with a view to spotting any educational relevance.

Melbourne work

The best work done so far is probably by Gregor Kennedy's gang.
Kennedy, G., Krause, K., Gray, K., Judd, T., Bennett, S., Maton, K., Dalgarno, B. & Bishop, A. (2006) "Questioning the Net Generation: A collaborative project in Australian higher education" In L.Markauskaite, P.Goodyear & P.Reimann (Eds) Who's learning? Whose technology? Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Australiasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (pp. 413-417) (Sydney: Sydney University Press)

Their report includes their questionnaire in full. http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/munatives/natives_report2006.pdf

  • Their Ascilite paper
  • http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/netgen/index.html
  • http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/munatives/index.html

    Our survey

  • Our survey

    Other

  • Youtube: if you look on youtube there are some videos making the same point as Prensky i.e. no data, just strong conviction based on personal opinions and experience (e.g. "irony in education", "Pay attention"). They are quite amusing, but even more nakedly arguments of the form "because some (young) people like to play with technology therefore all teaching must be done using these tools", which combines two logical fallacies in a single assertion.

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