Posts Tagged ‘Net Gen’
August 4, 2008
Blackwood High School Principal Susan Hyde is my guest this month on EdCom and she talks to us about how to engage 21st century students through the curriculum. Susan is a self-confessed theory junkie and her current passion is exploring the notion of connectivism and how ICTs in education can help students to make sense of the content that is so easily available to them on the Web. Susan talks about the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum and how to work teaching and learning across the disciplines, as well as the effects of Web 2.0 on education and the Net Generation. She despises what she calls ‘ideas assassins’ and encourages all teachers to explore the intellectual landscape of theory and thinking.
For more information, keep listening to EdCom and visit www.meganpoore.com.
File size: 22.2 MB
Running time: 27.42
Tags:EdCom, Net Gen, Podcasts, Web 2.0
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April 28, 2008
In the wake of the ‘Order for Closure’ fiasco that was visited upon Al Upton’s poor Mini-Legends, I’ve been doing some reading of the cybersafety research, trying to get some perspective on schools’ and parents’ cyberfears. The Creating and Connecting (pdf) report, put out in 2007 by the National School Boards Association in the US, makes several significant points in relation to students, social networking, and school responses:
- School policies and fears are out of whack with students’ and parents’ experiences of problems such as cyberbullying, cyberstalking and unwelcome encounters. Only a minority of students reported having had any kind of negative experience with social networking the previous three months, and even fewer parents reported that their children had had such experiences over the previous six months (p. 5)
- The problems encountered by young people online were the same as those encountered in any other media or in everyday life, namely inappropriate pictures and language (p. 5-6). Personally directed incidents were relatively rare, although of serious concern (p. 6).
- The majority of students are engaging in safe online behaviour, says the research (p. 6). This is also backed up by the Pew Internet Project’s Digital Footprints report, which shows that younger users of online sites are more to restrict access to their profiles and to withhold ‘hard’ information about themselves than are older users (pp. 21-22).
- In a pronounced example of schools’ misunderstanding of young people’s online behaviour and their attendant cybersafety awareness, the report demonstrates that fully 52% of school district leaders believed that “students providing personal information online has been a ‘significant problem’ in their schools”; and yet only 3% of students claimed to have ever handed over to strangers any personal information, including things such as their email address, IM details or chat name (p. 6).
Reports such as this one show that the same ‘stranger danger’ messages that we’ve always used with our kids also work online, and that children haven’t all of a sudden lost their ability to identify dodgy types, just because things are on the Web these days. Policies that prevent student access to the internet are reactive, arbitrary, unimaginative, and primarily about legal bottom-covering, rather than the realities of online life. Education is the key, and it seems to be working amongst parents and their children. Schools need to learn from that.
Tags:Being social, Cybersafety and cyberbullying, Education politics, Legal issues, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Social networking, Target, Use of media, Web Two Wowsers, Young people
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April 28, 2008
This is my new favourite report, even though it was published last year. I like it because the authors, Hannah Green and Celia Hannon, have solid opinions — informed by their own research — on how schools must engage with the learning needs of the Net Generation.
Green and Hannon insist that we must stop focusing so heavily on the hardware and instead start responding to the users: in other words, we need to build on what we know is already working with students, and we need to “develop strategies to bridge formal and informal learning” (p. 17), the latter of which is characterised in this context by self-motivation, ownership, purpose, and peer-to-peer learning (pp. 46-47). For Green and Hannon, it’s all about relationships and networks and not about PCs, which leads them to demand that we identify access to knowledge rather than access to hardware as characterising the new digital divide (p. 17, 59-60).
That’s the guts of what they’re saying, anyway. Here are some of the more specific points they make.
- The Net Gen use new media for strengthening existing relationships, rather than for creating new networks (p. 10). (The Never ending friending research found the same.)
- They are capable of self-regulation when kept well-informed about risks (p. 10)
- Debates around moral panic and technological determinism contrast with how Net Gen view and use technologies (p. 15).
- These technologies are used to facilitate already recognisable social interactions — nothing particularly new or crazy (p. 16).
- The internet provides a forum for creativity and expression — just as decorating your bedroom was an expression of the same for previous generations (p. 19). The difference is that the creations of the Net Gen are being shared with a worldwide audience (p. 19).
- There needs to be a focus on ‘soft skills’ rather than specific areas of knowledge (pp. 22-23). We need to be able to teach students initiative, intelligence, creativity, problem-solving … and we should lay off promoting the “false disctinction” (p. 24) between knowledge and skills.
- We must stop trying to figure out how children should be learning from technology; instead, we should seek to learn from their existing practices (p. 25). We need to tap into the students themselves as a resource, rather than thinking about what new resources can be added (pp 25-26).
- Young people are often concerned about the “unmanageable scale” of the Web and they find it difficult to evaluate and prioritise their search results (p. 68).
And here are some interesting stats:
- Few seem to value soft skills. Young people rank creativity fairly low: only eighth most important skill for the future (p. 27).
- Only 50% of parents selected ‘classroom lessons’ as the most important method of learning for their child (p. 30).
Tags:Being social, Digital divide, Learning environments, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Target, Use of media, Young people
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April 25, 2008
In a recent Demos report out of the UK (Their Space: Education for a digital generation), Hannah Green and Celia Hannon identify a number of ICT myths held by the moral panickers and by the followers of the digital faith. Here they are.
Moral panic myths
- The internet is dangerous for children. The Demos research showed that most children are aware of stranger danger on the internet and are quite capable of self-regulating (p. 32). This is consistent with the findings of other reports such as that put out by the NSBA (pdf, 1MB).
- Junk culture is poisoning young people and taking over their lives. Green and Hannon basically point out what an oooooold argument this is: youth culture always challenges the orthodoxy, they write, and they further point out that where once TV was the target, now the blame is spread across a wider spectrum of media (p. 34).
- No learning happens and digital technologies are a waste of time. On the contrary, students are deploying a broad range of skills when using ICTs, which, the authors argue, often gives students the confidence to succeed in other, more formal contexts (pp. 35-36). Indeed, Green and Hannon demonstrate that children are often more able to identify educationally beneficial computer games than are adults (p. 36-37).
There is an epidemic of internet plagiarism in schools. Plagiarism should not be conflated with new ways of accessing information, say Green and Hannon (p. 38), and we need to teach students the higher-order thinking skills of critique, interpretation, assessment and evaluation.- Young people are disengaged and disconnected. This is just flat-out wrong. Many students are using ICTs to engage with cultural and political issues and many also seek mentoring via their connections (p. 39).
- We’re seeing the rise of a generation of passive consumers. Not true. Students are taking part in media communities, gaming communities, networking communities, you name it, and often there is a large element of production, communication and creativity going on with what Net Gen are doing online (p. 40-41). Hardly passive.
Digital faith myths
- All gaming is good. There are different orders of digital activity in gaming, say Green and Hannon, and we need to be aware of that — just as many children are themselves, and not all activites are equal (p. 42).
- All children are cyberkids. Here, we have to be careful not to talk about a certain set of behaviours demonstrated by those with high access and motivation with a whole generation. Green and Hannon found that there was a gap between ‘everyday communicators’ and the ‘digital pioneers’ (p. 42-43).
Tags:Culture, Digital literacy, ICTs, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Social issues, Target, Young people
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April 1, 2008
Getting out and about to schools and colleges is always an enlivening ethnographic experience for me. Today, I gave a presentation called ‘Making sense of Net Gen Learning‘ to the excellent teachers of Hawker College in Canberra. The idea was to decode for them a little bit of what’s going on with their students: how Web 2.0 is affecting young people’s learning habits and their ways of being social. I also wanted to strain out of the whole brew what I think continues to be important in teaching and learning: the people. Judging by the sense I got from the room, this was a message they weren’t used to hearing.
Too often teachers are made to feel that they’re dinosaurs, superannuated geriatrics who need to get with the technology program or be retired into educational oblivion. And that’s just what the young ones are telling me! But the research shows that students see face-to-face interaction with their teachers as cardinal to their learning. The same and other research also show that young people are having real trouble construing their social experiences of the web onto potential educational experiences of the same.
So we’ve got us a situation. Kids who know the tech, but who still want face-to-face, and educators who know the teach, who still love the face-to-face, but no real convergence of needs. People who come into this job with talent and ardour should not be made to feel like write-offs. Instead, they need to be treated with patience and respect in their own learning journey so that they can inspire a whole new generation of learners. What a waste otherwise!
Tags:Learners, Net Gen, Opinion, Teachers
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February 18, 2008
In a recent post I pointed to CIBER’s report on Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf) which showed that Net Gen behaviours aren’t necessarily specific to one discrete age group. Nevertheless, the report did present some findings about the search activities of the younger demographic:
- The fit between search engines and students’ life styles today is ‘almost perfect’ — much better than is the fit for physical or online libraries (p. 7)
- The speed of young people’s web searching indicates that they spend little time in evaluating information for accuracy, relevance or authority (p. 12). But this also seems to be a pre-Web phenomenon (p. 23)
- There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before (p. 12)
- Young scholars are using tools that require little skill and are satisfied with very basic forms of searching (p. 14)
- Young people find it difficult to assess relevance when presented with a long string of hits (p. 12)
- It is likely that young people have good parallel processing skills, but it is unclear whether they are similarly developing the sequential processing abilities required for ordinary reading (p. 18)
- There is no evidence that young people are expert searchers. Studies pre-Web also reported that young people had difficulty in selecting search terms. (p. 22)
- There has been an increase in full-phrase searching, but this, too, predates the Web (p. 22)
I think the most important thing we need to take away from this report is the notion that the lack of sophistication and critique that characterises young people’s information searching is not a new phenomenon, brought about by being online: rather, youngsters have always had trouble evaluating and assessing information for relevance — perhaps it’s just that now their information searching behaviour is more public.
Tags:CIBER, Digital literacy, Net Gen, Target
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February 16, 2008
There’s always a lot of controversy whenever you start describing the social and online behaviours that characterise the ‘Net Gen’: Are they critically engaging with what they’re doing? Are they really able to keep a track of all that info that’s coming at them? What about online predators? Are the kids getting enough fresh air? Things get even hairier if you use the term ‘Digital Native’ (for some reason ‘Net Gen’ is less controversial than is ‘Digital Native’): There are lots of people born before the Net Gen who are perfectly at home in cyberspace; not all youngsters are ‘natives’ to this environment, anyway; this is all simplifying things too much.
I don’t have any real qualms over the terms used, as long as we recognise that when we’re using them we’re making generalisations and probably being ever-so-slightly reductionist. There is room for generalisation in anything — that, after all, is how analysis occurs: we interrogate material, look for patterns, and then organise it so that we can eventually create new meaning for ourselves.
But the question is nevertheless raised: How much are we describing behaviours that are peculiar to a specific age group, and how much are we describing the behaviours of anyone who spends a lot of time online? The CIBER team at University College London have gone some way to beginning to answer this question (see my previous post), but the fact remains that for most teachers their new learners will be young people, and, as such, the descriptions still hold good.
Tags:CIBER, Net Gen, Opinion
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February 16, 2008
The CIBER research team at University College London has just published a report that examines the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf). The report shows that it is not only youngsters but people from all age groups who exhibit certain behaviours when dealing with information on the internet. Here are some of the things CIBER found to be true across the generations when it comes to online behaviour:
- Young people are more competent with technology, but older users are catching up fast (p. 18)
- All of us are exhibiting increasing intolerance for information delay, not just the Net Gen (p. 19)
- More and more people are ‘power browsing’ through virtual libraries (p. 10; p. 19)
- Individual, personality and background factors are probably more important than generation when it comes to needing to feel constantly connected to the Web (p. 19)
- We are increasingly looking for ‘the answer’ rather than a particular format (e.g., monograph, journal) (p. 8 )
- Scholars are beginning to pre-publish their work through blogs, wikis and personal websites (p. 27)
These findings make perfect sense to me, because I increasingly see in myself and other, older net users many of the characteristics that are said to define Net Geners. What’s not important here is the age of the user but the fact that learners (most of whom will be young people) will be coming to us with certain ways of behaving in the cyber information environment. We need to know what those behaviours are.
Tags:Digital literacy, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Target
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February 8, 2008
It’s a bit old now, but given the dearth of research on what the Net Gen is actually doing at university now that they are starting to arrive on our campuses, I thought that this 2006 Uni of Melbourne study would still be of interest to readers.
The sub-title of the study about first year students’ experiences with technology is “Are they really Digital Natives?” I reckon it’s being a bit clever calling it that, because the answer, according to the findings the study presents, would seem to be ‘yes — pretty much’.
Some stats and general comments:
- 73% of students had broadband access, 93% had unrestricted access to a mobile phone, and 90% to a desktop computer. (p. 3)
- Computers were most commonly used for e-mailing (94%), creating documents (88%), general information searching (83%). (p. 3)
- Emerging computer-based technologies were blogs, file-sharing, social networking. (p. 3)
- International students use a wide-range of technologies and tools more so than local students. (p. 3)
- Students were overwhelmingly positive about using ICT in their studies, the main activities being using a computer for study purposes (94%), searching for information (93%), general course admin (84%), and SMS (84%) and IM (75%) communication. (p. 3)
- Engineering, Architecture and Building and Planning students were more likely to use particular technologies and to use them more frequently that were Education and Arts student. (p. 14)
- Convenience and control are the most valuable reasons cited by students for using ICTs in course — not learning. (p. 15)
On this last point, and as per the JISC report cited in my previous post, it seems that students have trouble figuring out how these technologies might be used in the academic setting to “optimise learning experiences and outcomes” (p. 16). This means that it’s up to teachers 1) to learn how to deploy these technologies in pedagogically sound fashion, and 2) if they are using certain techs in their teaching, to communicate clearly their expectations for learning and assessment.
Tags:Digital literacy, First-year experience, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Target, Technology, University
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February 8, 2008
Who would’ve thought that reading reports could be fun! I’ve been getting stuck into some stuff on Net Gen students and those who are entering university, so I’ll blog the most interesting points from an MP.com point of view.
JISC, in the UK, released its Student expectations study: Findings from preliminary research in September 2007. The study found that
- “students do come to university with a set of inherent expectations about ICT provision and use” (my emphasis) but that they also expressed a general uncertainty about what universities have to offer. This means that they try “to map their current learning experiences onto this world.”
- these students have preferences for using technology, see it as core to engaging socially and “regard ubiquitous internet access as the norm.”
- where it comes to publishing coursework online for public scrutiny, they are cautious.
- they see technology as part of the bigger picture of learning: it’s not an end in itself and there are other ways of doing things.
- they believe face-to-face interaction as core to their learning.
- they often cannot see how “ICT and learning can work together outside the school context.”
This last point is particularly interesting, especially in light of a 2006 University of Melbourne report that found that students’ attitudes to using blogs (and RSS, and web conferencing and social networking software) in their studies were largely ambivalent. (More on this report in my next blog post). Marry this up with the above findings, and I suspect that incoming students simply don’t have enough of an idea of how these things could be used for assessment purposes in their degrees.
Tags:Digital literacy, Net Gen, Reports and studies, Student expectations, Target, University
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