Learning and Teaching with ICT

Preparing my topic for my students next week I have found two interesting resources related to the idea of “digital natives”. The first is a video on edublog.tv about a vision of K-12 students today. This video is not unlike one that I have seen featuring older students sitting in a lecture theater in a tertiary institution, except this version features younger students holding up cards illustrating the difference in their uses of technology in and outside of schools. Here is the video: A vision of k-12 students today

The second resource that I found is a journal article by some Australian academics that argues the grand claims about ‘digital natives’ requires further investigation and can be likened to an academic form of ‘moral panic’. This article, featured in the credible British Journal of Educational Technology 2008, concludes that:

The picture beginning to emerge from research on young people’s relationship with technology is much more complex that the digital native characterisation suggests. While technology is embedded in their lives, young people’s use and skills are not uniform. … Young people may do things differently, but there are no grounds to consider them alien to us. Education may be under challenge to change, but is its not clear that it is being rejected (Bennett, Manton and Kervin, 2008).

My point of sharing both of these resources with my students is twofold. Firstly, to raise their awareness about calls for urgent educational reform in response to “digital natives” entering the education system and secondly, encourage them to think critically about the validity and implications of these claims. I concur with Bennett, Manton and Kervin (2008) that care is needed to remember that there …

appears to be a significant proportion of young people that do not have the levels of access or technology skills predicted by proponents of the digital native idea… [and that] it may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations. …Furthermore, the claim that there might be a particular learning style or set of learning preferences characteristic of a generation of young people is highly problematic (pp. 779-778, original emphasis).

Finally, I think it is important to remember that technology itself does not transform learning. Thus, whilst the use of web 2.0 tools has potential to improve learning and teaching, it is how these tools are used that is far more important.