Researchers of Tomorrow Lack Digital Skills

In the UK, JISC has just released a large study of the research behaviour of doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994. This is the supposedly digitally fluent "net generation". The digital natives who live and breath digital technology. Not so according to this study. Here the key findings:

• "This generation of doctoral students operate in an environment where their research behaviour does not use the full potential of innovative technology.
• Doctoral students are insufficiently trained or informed to be able to fully embrace the latest opportunities in the digital information environment.
• Doctoral students are increasingly reliant on secondary research resources (eg journal articles, books), moving away from primary materials (eg primary archival material and large datasets).
• Access to relevant resources is a major constraint for doctoral students’ progress. 
• Open access and copyright appear to be a source of confusion for Generation Y doctoral students, rather than encouraging innovation and collaborative research. Authentication access and licence limitations to subscription-based resources, such as e-journals, are particularly problematic. "

The three year study was jointly commissioned by the British Library and JISC and began in 2009. It involved 17,000 doctoral students from 70 universities at various stages in the project.

Read the full report.

Students Confused by Digital Technologies

"New research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), has revealed that some university students are confused by the array of technologies available to them during the course of their studies. The report, led by Dr Christopher Jones from the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, also found that whilst many students are distracted by social networking sites during study, a small minority of their peers do not even use e-mail."

Read more: http://www.scienceomega.com/article/301/is-the-net-generation-a-myth#ixzz1t9jXjBjh

The New Net Generation Myth

I guess it was bound to happen. As new technologies develop and spread, new myths are created.  We have had 10 years of unfounded hype about the "net generation" which we were told was fundamentally different than previous generations because of its exposure to digital technology. Never mind that most of these claims are not supported by research. Now we have many of the same claims being made but about the specific impact of mobile technologies and as a result we have new generational labels like the "mobile generation" or the "re-generation".

According to Tammy Erickson, in How Mobile Technologies are Shaping a New Generation, "the "Re-Generation" began to take shape around 2008. Individuals at the formative ages of 11 to 13, those born after about 1995, were part of a substantively different world than the one that had shaped 11 to 13 year olds over the preceding fifteen or so years...they are the first unconscious participants in an era when everyone has access to everything, everywhere, at every time. This is the generation of mobile technology, wireless communication, and clouds of constant content.

And what are the characteristics of this generation?

A pervasive sense of connection
Options (not obligations)
Anonymity and the ability to hide
Confidence and control . . . to be an initiator, designer, problem-solver

Sounds familiar. It is too easy to look at statistics on use and make all sorts of inferences but what good research has shown is that using a computer, tablet or smart phone for one task doesn't necessarily translate to others, doesn't make the user a sophisticated user of the technology and doesn't necessarily have any impact on other skills and traits.

Yes, the data clearly show widespread use of digital technology and mobile technology but it is a big leap from this to claims like,  " a generation of  unconsciously competent users of both computers and of the Internet. " or "a generation that is used to asking big questions — and is confident of finding answers. ... They have had the experience of digging deeply into a burning
question because they have access to a mountain of information."

We have only just managed to debunk the net generation myth. Let's not start again with a "regeneration" myth.

The Role of Digital Technology in Learning

Here's another study that suggests student use of digital technology in higher education is more complex and nuanced that the net gen discourse suggests. Gabriel et al's approach and findings are very similar to ours in the Digital Learners in Higher Education project. Among other things, like us, they found differences in how students thought about and used digital technologies in their academic and non-academic live:

"Students' most frequent use of technology outside of school was email, Internet, social media, texting on cell phones, instant messaging, and talking on cell phones. The focus was on communication and socializing with others. The students' most frequent use of digital technologies in school were (in descending order) accessing information on the Internet, using email, word processing, math and science programs, texting on cell phones, and accessing electronic databases. In school, the students tended to use digital technologies to collect, select, and work with information. The differences between these two lists are significant. Some students felt that there was a place for all technologies in an educational form, while others wanted to maintain a separate digital footprint for inside the classroom as well as outside the classroom digital technologies."

The Role of Digital Technology in Learning: Expectations of First Year University Student

Students Oppose Online Learning in Ontario

It's interesting that some of the most outspoken criticism of Ontario's plans to use more online learning in higher education is coming from.....students. Weren't we told that today's learners want more technology and less lecturing? That the current model of education is outmoded and that students wouldn't put up with it anymore?

From the Canadian Federation of Students:
"The fact that they're talking about such a massive overhaul without having reached out to faculty or students is cause for concern," said president Sandy Hudson.
"To think that three in five of all courses — the majority of courses in a year that students would be doing — would be online, that is definitely harming the quality of education," she added.
"If this is a measure to save money ... how far behind are Ontario students going to be with the rest of the country, with the rest of the world, if most of the learning that we're doing isn't even in front of a lecturer that we can then approach for assistance?"

So much for the net generation.

Understanding Digital Learners

David White and his colleagues at Oxford University are doing some interesting research that parallels what we have been doing in our Digital Learners in Higher Education project. Like us, they are finding there is much more to how learners are engaging with digital technologies and digital information than age and technology. This interview provides an overview of their findings to date and explains the digital visitors and residents framework that is guiding their research.

Profiles of Use: Resistors to Integrators

One of the major problems with the digital native discourse is that it frames digital literacy in generational terms and portrays all people of a certain age as possessing a uniform set of digital technology skills. Of course, we now know this is not accurate. Research shows the issue is much more complex. Our research is contributing to a deeper understanding of how learners think about and use digital technology in different aspects of their lives. Our preliminary analysis of the in-depth interviews we conducted with learners from the British Columbia Institute of Technology in 2010 and 2011 is suggesting a continuum of four "profiles of use" with the profile consisting of attitudes towards technology and use of technology. The profiles are:

Resistors
Resistors deliberately limit their use of digital technology or avoid it all together. They would rather be doing other things, or are in a phase of returning to the ‘basics’, engaging in alternative practices such as letter writing instead of e-mailing. They are resentful of the idea that their age defines their digital literacy.


Cautious Users
Cautious users express concern about privacy, and consciously separate their academic and social identities. Often they will maintain this separation even when it is inconvenient. For these users, Facebook seen as purely a social and entertainment tool.

Instrumental Users
Instrumental users also conscious separate their academic, social and professional identities. Their use is driven by specific interests or needs. For example, some of our subjects talked about their passion for digital gaming, photography and sports statistics and how they used online and digital technologies to pursue these interests but not more much else. Their use tended to be separated by location. i.e, social use at home, academic use at school. This included strategies such as leaving a laptop at home in order to avoid the distractions it presented when brought to the class.

Integrators
Integrators tend to be heavy smart phone users who are constantly connected. For this group the convenience of portability in one device that the smart phone provides is key. They only use a laptop or desktop computer if absolutely necessary. They value integration of technology and don't see the point of keeping academic and social activities separate.

Emerging Practice in a Digital Age

It is refreshing to read a report on the use of digital technologies in education that doesn't frame the issue in generational terms. Emerging Practice in a Digital Age provides a very useful and interesting summary of 10 case studies of emerging practice using digital technologies in British higher education. Terms such as digital native, millennial learner, or net generation are nowhere to be found in this document. Instead, the drivers of change identified are: increased personalization and choice, developing new markets and economic pressures.

The 10 case studies are organized into three themes:
1. Working in partnership with students
2. Developing students' employability potential
3. Preparing for the future

The report cautions:
"in our enthusiasm to embrace the new we should not assume that ownership of new technologies and the apparent fluency with which they are used in daily life implies knowledge of how to use them effectively to support learning. We need a better understanding of the digital literacies that students and staff need to take advantage of the new opportunities, and we need to integrate these in our programmes of study and continuing professional development."

Emerging Practice in a Digital Age  was published by the British educational technology organization, JISC

The Sad State of Educational Research

After four years of digging into the digital native/net generation/millennial learner rhetoric, I have come to a distressing conclusion. The main culprits in promoting and perpetuating the unfounded claims and stereotypes are not just the pundits and commentators who started this ball rolling but educational researchers who have accepted and repeated these claims without subjecting them to the critical scrutiny you would expect.

So what we have is a process that begins with somebody making an unfounded claim that has resonance and at first glance seems to make sense (young people have been exposed to digital technology from birth so they must technologically fluent and educators need to respond this). Educators then repeat this claim and begin to frame research according to this unfounded perspective. Other researchers then cite the research of their colleagues which is based on these unfounded claims and pretty soon the original unfounded claims have been virtually accepted as self-evident truths.

This was brought to light quite vividly as I read the newly-published article, PowerPoint and Learning Theories: Reaching Out to the Millennials by Karen Gardner and Jolanta Aleksejuniene. Their study attempted to map student preferences for Power Point styles with Cognitive Load, Multimedia and Visual Learning Theories. Nothing wrong with this except their rationale was couched in the now discredited and unfounded millennial learner discourse: “As millennials, today’s students are independent, inclusive (move between global and virtual communities), opinionated and aware, investigative (use technology), and expect immediacy (information at light speed) (Lippincott, 2010)… There is a developing awareness that millennial students consider technology central to communication. As we continue to introduce technology into our teaching and learning, it behooves us to make this form of communication as effective as possible.”

I thought I had read almost everything that had been written on this issue but I wasn’t familiar with the author that Gardner and Aleksejuniene cited to support their claim: Lippincott.  So before I jumped to conclusions I thought I should check the Lippincott article (Informationcommons: Meeting millennials, needs. Journalof Library Administration, 50(1), 27-37) to see if she had conducted some research that supported this claim or at least cited some research I was not aware of. What I found was more of the same. No original research but rather the repetition of the unfounded claims made by the usual sources like Prensky, Palfrey & Gasser and Oblinger & Oblinger to support her conclusion that this generation has distinctive learning styles, is fluent with digital technology, and is able to multitask efficiently. Based on this she concludes: “libraries need to understand the style of their net generation students to provide environments conducive to engagement and learning; these include how libraries present access to their collections and licensed materials, how they instruct students, how they promote services, and how they configure their spaces.” But what about all the research that debunks the millennial myth? No problem, Lippincott dismisses that in one line: “Although some believe that the characterization of an entire generation constitutes a stereotype or is just plain erroneous, others accept that there are some common ways in which many of this current generation of students are different from those who came before." So research isn’t about investigation and critical analysis it’s just about choosing which perspective you like. Some say this, others say that. I think I’ll go with this one.

In summary, we have a house of cards. Research informed by unfounded claims based on other unfounded claims. If we want educational research to be taken seriously, we need to do better.

Will Practice Catch up to Research?

Two items that appeared in my news reader this week that make me wonder about the educational profession. First there was this one:

"Open University Research Explodes the Myth of the Digital Native"
It's not like we need any more evidence to put this discredited discourse to bed but this study does more than simply add to the growing pile of research that shows how thoroughly unsupported the digital native claims are. It also provides a glimpse of the kind of interesting issues that emerge when we look beyond the generational stereotypes and start to explore exactly what is happening with learners and digital technology (something we at Digital Learners in Higher Education are doing, by the way). So while this study of 4,000 UK Open University students simply confirmed what others have already found in other institutions - "no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis", the more interesting findings were the ones that have nothing to do with age. For example, the researchers discovered a correlation between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. "In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work."

So, after reading about this latest research I start thinking perhaps, finally, the tide has turned and that the digital native hype may be on the wane. Then I read this:

Mastering the Millennial in Seven Easy Steps. A workshop that will teach you how to connect and engage with this notoriously difficult generation. All in seven easy steps and only for $345. According to the seminar organizers:
"Millennial students have a unique way of seeing the world and often have high expectations of how others should work for them. This generation has the distinction of being seen as hard to work with and engage, while at the same time being extremely passionate and technologically savvy. This seminar is designed to help faculty and staff better understand and motivate millennial students in and out of the classroom."

It puzzles me why it is acceptable to stereotype based on age when we would never get away with doing this based on ethnicity or gender. Replace "millennial" in the above description with "female" or "asian" or "african-american" and you'll see what I mean.

The research is clear: there is no evidence to support the major digital native claims. Millennial students are not a homogeneous group who can be treated like a species of animal. One day, I hope, practice will catch up to the research.