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The Digital Natives Myth

One of the pervasive myths of the digital literacy landscape is that young people are generally 'in' the digital world and older people are generally struggling to engage with it. The catchiest term for this is that young people are Digital Natives (being born into the digital age) and the rest of us are Digital Immigrants (coming to in in later life). While this is literally true, the conclusions about the gap in engagement with ICT are frequently exaggerated if not simply false.

I have been teaching a group of 30 or so university students in a multimedia course for the last four years and the Digital Native notion has each year been demonstrated to be false. These have been students who chose a computer learning course yet about a third have quite modest skills in using computers, another third were competent and about a third were behaving as Digital Natives are supposed to behave - using blogs, social networking and generally being creative users.

This issue has been well researched by a project involving several universities and a collection of their reports is at Educating the Net Generation (Uni Melb.) and their large scale study supports my simple observations. See 'The Net Generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies'. They also demonstrate in another story that the gap in skills between university students and staff is not as great as generally reported.

It is interesting to ask why such ideas as the Natives-Immigrants gap are accepted so readily in many forums. I think it is because it is an idea that Henny-Penny Optimists enjoy. The Henny-Penny Optimists are experts in ICT who promote a nicely contradictory point of view that, a) the world as we know it is ending, everything is changing, revolution is at hand, young people's brains are being re-wired by use of technology, and b) the future with ICT is liberating, collaborative and totally wonderful. Like the original Henny-Penny, these people create a lot of alarm and unnecessary panic. When the HPOs promote the Digital Natives idea, they alarm many teachers and administrators, particulalry those who have low ICT skills about the impossible and widening gap between themselves and their students.

The reality, as usual, is much more complex and not as exciting as simplistic generalisations like Digital Natives suggest.

Tags: professional learning digital literacy
Posted at 08:47AM Jan 16, 2009 by John Travers  |  Comments[1]