Session Information
06 SES 09, Comparative Perspectives on "Digital natives" Entering Higher Education.
Symposium
Contribution
The rhetoric of Digital Natives and the Net Generation can lead to simple characterisations of an entire generation of young people. It is claimed that young students force radical changes in university education. This paper reports multi-method research in five English universities which suggests a far more complex picture in which there are internal divisions within the Net Generation age group based on age, university mode, gender and the national or international status of the students. The complex picture has important implications for governments, university policy makers and teachers. The research was based on three surveys, interviews with staff (faculty) and students and a cultural probe that prompted students to make video records of their daily activities. The paper reports summary results bringing together these different data sources to provide a rich picture of students in one advanced industrial country. The data suggests that whilst age is a highly significant factor affecting the take up and use of digital technologies, it does not conform to a generational pattern because there are variation within the Net Generation age group. Gender continues to influence student use of digital technologies and university mode (face to face or distance) also has some effect.
Method
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.