Digital Learners in Higher Education: Generation is Not the Issue

The idea that generation explains how young people use digital technologies and that these "digital natives" are fundamentally different from the older "digital natives" in how they use and understand technology has been successfully debunked. Our work and in particular, the article, Digital Learners in Higher Education: Generation is Not the Issue, is part of the significant body of research that has exposed the superficiality of the techno-determinist rhetoric of the popular futurists (e.g., Tapscott, Prensky, Palfrey & Gasser and others). This article has been accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Learning & Technology but will probably not be published until sometime in 2011 so we are making a pre-publication version of the article available now.

We and others (e.g., see special issues of Journal of Computer Assisted Learning and Learning, Media & Technology) have moved beyond the simplistic generational perspective and have begun to explore the deeper and more important issues related to how higher education learners understand and use digital technologies in different parts of their lives. Stay tuned for more on this.

Educating the Net Generation - Australian Research Project

It's too bad this research project has the same title as the book by Oblinger and Oblinger because, unlike the book, this research project does a much better job of providing some evidence-based understanding of how this generation is using digital technology and the implications for teaching and learning.

The project, which is based at the University of Melbourne has investigated how "commencing first year students and their teachers use traditional and emerging technology-based tools in their everyday lives and to support student learning and drawn on the expertise of teachers and the results of this investigation to develop and implement pedagogically sound, technology-based tools to enhance student learning in local learning environments."

One of the outputs of the project is a handbook, Educating the Net Generation: A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy which is available for download. The researchers have also published a number of articles and made several presentations at academic conferences.

Key findings of this research project:

1. The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported.
2. There is great diversity in students’ and staff experiences with technology, and their preferences for the use of technology in higher education.
3. Emerging technologies afford a range of learning activities that can improve student learning processes, outcomes, and assessment practices.
4. Managing and aligning pedagogical, technical and administrative issues is a necessary condition of success when using emerging technologies for learning.
5. Innovation with learning technologies typically requires the development of new learning and teaching and technology-based skills, which is effortful for both students and staff.
6. The use of emerging technologies for learning and teaching can challenge current university policies in learning and teaching and IT.