Session Information
06 SES 09, Comparative Perspectives on "Digital natives" Entering Higher Education.
Symposium
Contribution
In the last decade several writers have proposed that the students entering higher education will be of a new kind. They have been exposed to computers and multimedia since birth and used them as tools for communication, for collaboration and self-expression, predominantly in their leisure, and increasingly in their studies. Both in school as well as in their day-to-day activities, a generation of young people has become immersed in the use of technologies for their entertainment, their social life and their learning. They are called "Generation Y", "Homo Zappiens", "Net-generation" or "Digital natives" by writers such as Van Ween, Tapscott and Prensky. A number of vivid descriptions of how young people use technologies in new and radical ways to make their studies meaningful and eventful have been offered. In contrast, numerous empirical research studies show a more complex picture of the age related changes taking place. Some writers suggest that the education sector moves far to slowly to offer these students a challenging and relevant context of study. In effect they claim that higher education institutions, as we know them, would need to radically re-engineer their constitution to adapt to the learning capabilities, needs and motivation these students have developed. The suggestion is that higher education institutions as we currently know them are goverened by digital immigrants who will be unable to follow the intense new developments in the sector.
The challenges higher education is confronted with are universal, but they can be framed in different ways. In high-income Western countries high investments are made in order to supply higher education with the technology that can match students expectations. Low-income countries adopt strategies to make technology available for a rapidly growing number of students. However the number of students who have actually been exposed to extensive use of technology is no longer simply a Western phenomenon. A growing number of developing economies, such as the Newly Industrialising Countries have widespread access to similar technologies, and with a young generation that experience an intensified globalisation and modernisation through media culture.
The symposium will focus on an empirically based assessment of the Net-generation concept and how higher education in China, the UK and Norway is preparing itself for the challenge of catering for the attitudes, expectations and hopes of the new generation of students. The papers will discuss what constitutes the competencies and attitudes of students entering higher education in the technological area, and provide a more nuanced perspective on how well prepared young students are for the digital future.
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