“Has Education Changed In the Digital Age” was a presentation by Ralph Holland of South Tyneside College. He was mostly presenting quantitative data from a survey he conducted of use of technology to enhance teaching at South Tyneside College.
Most of the results from this survey in my opinion were very unsurprising. There seemed to be the typical curve of a small minority using hardly any on-line tools, a large majority dabbling but not really pushing forwards and again a small minority pushing ahead and really trying to enhance their teaching through technology. I believe this is a pretty accurate picture of technology enhanced teaching every where. In my opinion you could do this survey at almost any FE or HE institution in the UK and get very similar results. One of the interesting things about what I’ll call this “average spread” is that from the lectures who responded (15% of those polled, pretty respectable in my view) the largest age group category was the 51-60 year olds which Ralph refereed to as “Digital Immigrants”. If the notion of the digital immigrant was true then I would have thought that “age as an indicator to technology use” would have meant that we should have seen more negative results from the later questions. This didn’t appear to be the case though, but concede that I didn’t intensely analyse the data so my view could be incorrect.
What I did find surprising was the reliance on the “Digital Natives” (Prensky, 2001) concept. I felt the under current of the presentation was one of; “we must use these tools because our students not only expect to use them but are adept at doing so because they have grown up around them”. I may have read to much into this, but I even asked the question at the end for Ralph’s thoughts about Digital Natives, to which he responded positively and that he was behind the concept. My personal experience of this is quite the reverse. We have a lot of students who are within the age range of the “digital native” who have problems with what I would consider to be basic computer skills. We still run computer skills sessions for students of all ages, backgrounds and year of study. If as Prensky suggests those born after 1981 think differently and have different skills then surely these courses would be surplus to requirements.
Although there is plenty of anecdotal tales to suggest that “young people can use technology” its is not across the board, with all technology. Are they good at using their mobile phones for instance, because they were born into a world of “digital everything” or because they have been exposed to mobile communications and are motivated to learn how to use them? This piece of research threw up anecdotal evidence that totally contradicts this idea. Teaching staff seemed to being having problems getting students to access resources in the VLE and in some cases students couldn’t even remember their own Hotmail address.
I have a personal issue with the Prensky’s Digital Natives concept and as such I must acknowledge that I may have let this cloud my judgement and so misinterpreted the general tone of the presentation. Hopefully I will be able to present some initial findings from our own research soon, that is attempting to test the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant theory.
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