Considerable attention has been given to the first generation of students who have grown up in the digital age and are coming to our educational institutions with skills and experiences using a variety of digital technologies. Most of these students, who were born roughly between 1980 and 1994, represent the first generation to grow up with this new technology. They have spent most of their lives surrounded by digital communication technology. They use the Internet, text messaging, and social networking, but they are using these technologies primarily for social and entertainment purposes.
Until recently the notion that there is a generation of digital learners with distinct skills and characteristics attributable to the exposure to digital technology had been accepted uncritically by many educators. Remarkably few studies carefully investigated the characteristics of this group and most of these studies were methodologically unsound and tended to be anecdotal. For that reason, the aim of this paper is to offer a unifying concept about students in the digital era under the term “digital learners” and provide an argumentation for adopting this concept.
The generation of students born roughly between 1980 and 1994 have been given many names over the past decade to emphasize their affinity and tendency to use digital technology, such as “Generation Y” (Howe & Strauss, 1991), “Millennials” (Howe & Strauss, 1991), “Net generation” (Tapscott, 1998), “Digital natives” (Prensky, 2001), “New millennial learners” (Pedró, 2006), “Learners of Digital Era” (Rapetti & Cantoni, 2010), “Digital nerds and digital normal” (Thirunarayanan, Lezcano, McKee & Roque, 2011) and others. Each way of describing this group of students carries with it some distinct features, but in general the terms are used interchangeably (Jones, Ramanau, Cross & Healing, 2010, p. 723). The three most common terms in circulation are: Net generation, Millennials (also known as Generation Y) and Digital Natives (Jones et al., 2010).
Whatever the terminology, the argument that students who nowadays enter higher education have been exposed to a wide range of digital technologies (which did not previously exist) is accurate (Brown & Czerniewicz, 2010: 357). Discussions about them usually center on an assumption about the existence of a homogeneous generation of prolific users of technology. There is a growing body of academic research that questions the validity of the generational assumption (Kennedy, Krause, Judd, Churchward & Gray, 2008; Bennett, Maton & Kervin, 2008; Bullen, Morgan & Qayyum, 2011; Thirunarayanan et al., 2011).
The literature review revealed 40 terms related to the notion of these supposedly “new generation” of students, some similar, others quite different and many of them redundant. For that reason, we propose to unify these concepts under the term “digital learners”. Assuming that the current generation of learners has been so deeply affected by digital technologies, the expression “digital learners” refers generically and synthetically to all those labels (Digital Natives, Generation Y, Net generation, Millennials, etc.) (Rapetti, 2012, p. 39).
