John Travers

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Adelaide,   SA,   Australia
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web2, Digital Storytelling, Aust Digital Revolution, web2ools, Cyber Safety, ednatv, Grassroots Video, me-edu-au, WeavingICT, edna2010
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John Travers
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Thursday Aug 28, 2008

'Digital natives' experience in using ICT - a little survey

levels of experience in ICT

The graph below is a summary of the experience of a number of university students in using a range of common ICT tools. These students have chosen to do a topic on current technologies for teaching and presumably have a greater interest in the field that the average student. The responses are interesting because they do not indicate that the so-called digital natives are heavily engaged in the technologies. There is high level experience with email and with social networking, presumably because these are powerful communication tools. But quite valuable information management tools like delicious and rss are little used.

The question on YouTube needs another: 'have you uploaded videos to YouTube or similar. I suspect that the response would be quite low. The low use of Flickr type photo sharing is surprising. Low use of blog is to be expected since one really needs a purpose to be a blog user. The overall impression I get is that this small and very informal survey shows what we can expect: that young people in tertiary education are mainstream users of ICT, but only in fields that have immediate relevance. Tools to leverage some of the big advantages of the information society have yet to prove themselves.

 

Tags: multimedia literacy digital literacy
Posted at 06:10PM Aug 28, 2008 by John Travers  |  Comments[2]

Comments:

I'm not sure but I think that the actions and attitudes of those who use these tools alot influence the uptake of those that use the tools less. Maybe a combination of the 'experts' having a proprietry feeling over their knowledge 'I'm a bit special because I know about the computer stuff' and the 'novice' feeling like the computer stuff is too hard so I won't bother. I haven't quite nailed my thoughts on this but I think perhaps if we are interested in leveraging the advantages of ICT then we need to think about how to encourage the 'experts' to give the 'novice' a helping hand up. I think this will be a bit of a cultural shift.

Posted by Concetta Gotlieb on August 28, 2008 at 06:35 PM CST #

I'm not sold that the digital natives have hit university yet. Computers are still not ubiquitous -- people hide them away in bedrooms or "offices" in their homes and schools have special "labs' where some teachers get an hour a week with a class if they're lucky. I look at my 3-year old nephew who has had his own computer and desk since he was 2 and a half. Computers are in the main room of his home. He has his own digital camera, mum and dad have mobiles with cameras as well as a nice digital camera. He talks to his grandad in Perth via web cam. He seems more of a digital native to me. In the meantiime, we're all in this together. : )

Posted by KerryJ on September 13, 2008 at 05:44 PM CST #

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