Last changed 12 March 2008 ............... Length about 700 words (7,000 bytes).
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Digital Natives

By Steve Draper, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.

This page is firstly to hold some web links on the topic of Digital Natives.

The most hysterical view is that young people growing up with current ICT are and act quite differently from older ones, and the universities are hopelessly out of tune with this.

At the other extreme, any university needs to track what ICT skills its incoming students have so as to readjust the IT training they get. Slightly more careful, is the view that new technology developments (e.g. Web 2.0, wikipedia, etc.) need to be examined continually with a view to spotting any educational relevance.

Melbourne work

The best work done so far is probably by Gregor Kennedy's gang.
Kennedy, G., Krause, K., Gray, K., Judd, T., Bennett, S., Maton, K., Dalgarno, B. & Bishop, A. (2006) "Questioning the Net Generation: A collaborative project in Australian higher education" In L.Markauskaite, P.Goodyear & P.Reimann (Eds) Who's learning? Whose technology? Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Australiasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (pp. 413-417) (Sydney: Sydney University Press)

Their report includes their questionnaire in full. http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/munatives/natives_report2006.pdf

Their Ascilite paper

http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/netgen/index.html

http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/munatives/index.html

Our survey

Other

JISC Sept07 MORI report: lead in page PDF 1Mb
Charles Crook's web2.0 project
Define web2?
Marc Prensky (2001a) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1" On the Horizon Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001, pp.1-6 (This journal was published by MCB University Press, now Emerald.) This paper is also available from www.marcprensky.com and from here. URLs http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/ http://pre2005.flexiblelearning.net.au/projects/resources/Digital_Natives_Digital_Immigrants.pdf (visited 2008 March 11).
Marc Prensky (2001b) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 2: Do they really think differently?" On the Horizon Vol. 9 No. 6, pp.1-6 This paper is also available from www.marcprensky.com.
[ Judging by a search of the internet, the above two citations of these seminal articles may be the only citations of them approaching correctness anywhere. Everyone else seems to have copied the author's citation at the top of the version he has on his web pages. However he made two technical errors: a) he omitted page numbers, which are required (even if not very important in practice); b) he says the journal was published by "NCB university press": this is a typo for MCB ... (MCB is thought to stand for Management Centre, Bradford.) I copied the page numbers above from the publisher's contents pages, but have not verified them from a copy of the journal. Internal inconsistencies in the page numbers there raise a doubt about their accuracy. Of course none of this matters in practice since everyone has better access to the papers from open web pages including the author's own, than from a library. However it is interesting as an example of how errors in academic bibliographies propagate: in this case, due to the author himself rather than lazy citers. See Read before you cite!. ]

Youtube: if you look on youtube there are some videos making the same point as Prensky i.e. no data, just strong conviction based on personal opinions and experience (e.g. "irony in education", "Pay attention"). They are quite amusing, but even more nakedly arguments of the form "because some (young) people like to play with technology therefore all teaching must be done using these tools", which combines two logical fallacies in a single assertion.

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