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Net Generation or not?

Have you felt diminished, even excluded, by assertions that more experienced - all right, older - teachers are out of touch with the way young people use modern technology? Are you aware of being categorised as a 'digital immigrant', unable to understand fully how the 'digital natives' who are your pupils communicate or how they learn? Have you had a sense of being threatened by expectations that learning and teaching must be delivered increasingly by technological means: through the use of computers, through the Internet, through Glow? This has been a message behind successive government plans to expand Internet access and computer use and by critics claiming that teaching and teachers have not moved rapidly enough in this direction.

In an article in the June 2010 edition of the British Educational Research Journal, two researchers from Oxford University test the notion that there is a generation gap between those born since the explosion of computer use in the 1980s and previous generations. Using data from the 2007 Oxford Internet Survey, Ellen Johanna Helsper and Rebecca Eynon compared the significance of various factors in determining the extent to which people may be categorised as 'digital natives', which they define as:

"someone who multi-tasks, has access to a range of new technologies, is confident in their use of technologies, uses the Internet as a first port of call for information and … uses the Internet for learning as well as other activities".

The variables they examined included the age of the individual, the length of time they have been using the Internet (i.e. level of experience) and the range of uses to which they put the Internet.

Their findings do not support the casual assumption that age is the key determinant of being a 'digital native'. Indeed they argue that such the distinction between 'digital natives' and 'digital immigrants' could even be harmful as teachers, and by implication others, anticipate, in some cases inaccurately, that pupils will be confident and comfortable in their use of high technology. Although obviously many young people are highly skilled, pupil involvement with digital technologies is far from homogeneous. In fact, the other two factors also turned out to be significant influences, as did gender, with women being less likely to turn first to the Internet for information than were men. The most important variable was the breadth of activities that an individual carries out on line.

The researchers conclude that there are two key messages from their study. The first is that teachers are capable of speaking the same technological language as their pupils, the second that young people's usage of technology is not always constructive, so its uses in education are still a matter of debate.

Details: E.J. Helsper and R. Eynon, Digital natives: where is the evidence?, British Educational Research Journal, vol. 36, no.3, June 2010, pp.503-520.