The digital native is a myth

[Arthur]

I have suspected this all along.

 

Source: Article / Paper (PDF)

 

Some people put the cut-off at 1984, but for most it is 1980. People born after that date are the digital natives; those born before are digital immigrants, doomed to be forever strangers in a computer-based strange land.

 

The generational difference between the groups goes beyond their numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers: it can also help to explain differences in how they buy insurance. At least, that’s according to a report released this week for the insurance industry. Targeting Millennials with Insurance explains that young people aren’t like those who came before and queued passively for cover. They “prioritize holidays”, for one, which might surprise some of them. Because they are digital natives, they “will favor technologically innovative insurance policies”.

 

But a paper published last month in Teaching and Teacher Education reaches the opposite conclusion. The digital native is a myth, it claims: a yeti with a smartphone (P. A. Kirschner and P. D. Bruyckere Teach. Teach. Educ. 67, 135–142; 2017). The implications go beyond insurance. Many schools and universities are retooling to cope with kids and young adults who are supposedly different. From collaborative learning in the classroom to the provision of e-learning modules in undergraduate courses, the rise of the digital native is being used as a reason — some say a justification — for significant policy changes.

 

[...]

 

A 2011 review for the Higher Education Academy in York, UK, put it bluntly, as the first of its executive-summary conclusions: “There is no evidence that there is a single new generation of young students entering Higher Education and the terms Net Generation and Digital Native do not capture the processes of change that are taking place”. Many members of the digital-savvy generation use technology in the same way as many of their elders: to passively soak up information. Children say they prefer IT in their lessons and courses? Do schools listen when kids say they prefer chips for lunch every day?

 

The Teaching and Teacher Education paper raises another concern. Digital natives are assumed to be able to multitask, it warns. But the evidence for this is also scant. Reading text messages during university lectures almost certainly comes at a cognitive cost. So too, employers might assume, does fiddling with smartphones and laptops in meetings. Buy that technologically innovative insurance policy another time.

 

Abstract

Current discussions about educational policy and practice are often embedded in a mind-set that considers students who were born in an age of omnipresent digital media to be fundamentally different from previous generations of students. These students have been labelled digital natives and have been ascribed the ability to cognitively process multiple sources of information simultaneously (i.e., they can multitask). As a result of this thinking, they are seen by teachers, educational administrators, politicians/policy makers, and the media to require an educational approach radically different from that of previous generations. This article presents scientific evidence showing that there is no such thing as a digital native who is information-skilled simply because (s)he has never known a world that was not digital. It then proceeds to present evidence that one of the alleged abilities of students in this generation, the ability to multitask, does not exist and that designing education that assumes the presence of this ability hinders rather than helps learning. The article concludes by elaborating on possible implications of this for education/educational policy.

 

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

[elsiegee40]

Interesting. I never put an actual year on the Digital Natives theory ... and in my mind it's considerably later than those used in this report. (1980 & 1984)

 

I have really only ever thought of it as those who grew up with the internet as the default option and those that didn't. My children, both born in the mid 1990s, didn't have the all-consuming internet and mobiles until they were at secondary school in the mid-late 2000s. They're not digitally native.

 

There is a generation of digital natives to come, but they're still at school at the moment.

[jthompson]

Digital natives. Are those the ones who know how to use Movie Maker but don't know the difference between a project file and a WMV?

[jthompson]

Interesting. I never put an actual year on the Digital Natives theory ... and in my mind it's considerably later than those used in this report. (1980 & 1984)

 

Same here. I would have though late-nineties. Kids who don't remember dial-up or not having WiFi in the home.

[arwen]

Same here. I would have though late-nineties. Kids who don't remember dial-up or not having WiFi in the home.

 

I agree with this as well. I was born in 1989, and definitively remember times before the internet was everywhere, all of the time. Yet I think being a teenager when it was "evolving" has helped with being at ease with it.

[Ephelyon]

I was born in late '86, but I do see a difference between myself and those born only a few years later. I would put it at around 1990.

 

For nostalgia, people of my generation should read the 'Internet Detectives' series that was published in the mid-90s

[Disease]

I was born in 72 and I have used the internet since the early 90's, and I use technology at every opportunity, so what does that make me if not a digital native?

[jthompson]

I was born in 72 and I have used the internet since the early 90's, and I use technology at every opportunity, so what does that make me if not a digital native?

 

A digital immigrant. It might sound bad, but actually, digital immigrants often work a lot harder than digital natives, doing the sorts of digital dirty work that digital natives can be too lazy or too afraid to do themselves (such as emptying the recycle bins, applying updates and typing full sentences).

[Disease]

A digital immigrant. It might sound bad, but actually, digital immigrants often work a lot harder than digital natives, doing the sorts of digital dirty work that digital natives can be too lazy or too afraid to do themselves (such as emptying the recycle bins, applying updates and typing full sentences).

 

 

What a load of old Tosh, by the the definition of a Digital Immigrant I should be like my grandad, who I might add was writing his memoirs on an Amiga A600 when they first came out.

 

Digital immigrants are believed to be less quick to pick up new technologies than digital natives. This results in the equivalent of a speaking accent when it comes to the way in which they learn and adopt technology. A commonly used example is that a digital immigrant may prefer to print out a document to edit it by hand rather than doing onscreen editing.

 

Load of rubbish.

 

I've had a computer and gaming since I was 10, years before these so called digital natives were a twinkle in their daddies eyes, in fact I and a lot of my generation are more au fait and integrated with technology than many many people born into the so called digital native period or even born today. All they are are Digital consumers as most of them take the technology for granted without any understanding or willingness to understand of how any of it works, yet they are described as better able to pick up new technologies.

[GrumbleDook]

I am seriously surprised at this paper ... Prensky shifted from Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom back in 2012. This is not new in any shape of form, in fact, if you look at curriculum developments over the last 5 years, it already takes this into account.

 

Digital Leaders, the Maker community ... all show that young learners are not natives, but gain Digital Wisdom through engagement and building of skills and competence ... as with pretty much anything else!

[Ephelyon]

I hear that ... the amount of times I've had to correct people when they assume that "they're kids, they'll know how to operate it"...

 

No, they're just less scared of pushing buttons than you (because they're generally less scared of things, being kids). That doesn't mean they have any more of a clue what they're doing!

[jthompson]

I hear that ... the amount of times I've had to correct people when they assume that "they're kids, they'll know how to operate it"...

 

No, they're just less scared of pushing buttons than you (because they're generally less scared of things, being kids). That doesn't mean they have any more of a clue what they're doing!

 

As @Disease says, they are Digital Consumers. The user interfaces that the average consumer gets presented with are, by and large, designed so as to not need any training or qualifications to use. I'm never that impressed to see a class full of kids take to Word like ducks to water, because a highly paid professional team of designers have laboured over it for years to that end. For me, it's all about how someone handles things when they go wrong: how does one of those kids using Word deal with some buggy formatting that the usual UI option can't help them with?

 

It's just as important for them as for any other generation to be able to improvise, be adaptable and think laterally. After all, who here would say that they don't need any of those qualities to work with digital technology on a daily basis?

Edited July 31, 2017 by jthompson

[Ephelyon]

Teachers?

 

 

(I jest. I actually like teachers.)

[Disease]

As @Disease says, they are Digital Consumers. The user interfaces that the average consumer gets presented with are, by and large, designed so as to not need any training or qualifications to use. I'm never that impressed to see a class full of kids take to Word like ducks to water, because a highly, paid professional team of designers have laboured over it for years to that end. For me, it's all about how someone handles things when they go wrong: how does one of those kids using Word deal with some buggy formatting that the usual UI option can't help them with?

 

It's just as important for them as for any other generation to be able to improvise, be adaptable and think laterally. After all, who here would say that they don't need any of those qualities to work with digital technology on a daily basis?

 

Agreed the amount of people who are unable to carry out even the most basic troubleshooting of their technology makes me wonder how on earth they manage at home when something goes wrong with their tech/TV/Kettle/Smart fridge and no IT staff around to 'Fix it'. I have had young people complain that their TV is not working when it's just flat batteries in the remote, no basic trouble shooting skills at all. If that is being a digital native then I am glad I am not tarred with that title.

[GrumbleDook]

It is not trouble shooting ... it is called problem solving and there are very clear strands in the curriculum about this.

 

The problem (forgive the pun) is that this tends to be done in silos, and not spread across subjects / concepts.

 

This is about breadth and not depth ... and the present educational focus does not allow for much interaction between subjects.

 

Again, this is why folk got peeved about STEM and insisted on STEAM instead.

 

In EY, problem solving is making a come back, and so we should see improvements in about 8 years in Secondary as a result.

[Ephelyon]

I find it's not an inability to problem-solve, more a lack of willingness to do so based on the idea that they've "got someone for that". That's not an issue of a missing skillset; it will require a culture shift.

[Disease]

It is not trouble shooting ... it is called problem solving and there are very clear strands in the curriculum about this.

 

The problem (forgive the pun) is that this tends to be done in silos, and not spread across subjects / concepts.

 

This is about breadth and not depth ... and the present educational focus does not allow for much interaction between subjects.

 

Again, this is why folk got peeved about STEM and insisted on STEAM instead.

 

In EY, problem solving is making a come back, and so we should see improvements in about 8 years in Secondary as a result.

 

I am skeptical as the 'problem solving' will be/is being taught by people with no 'problem solving' skills themselves, no real world ones anyway.

[Ephelyon]

I don't think we've managed to raise any generations with no problem-solving skills, although it could be argued that we have equipped some generations with more than others.

 

I really do think it's a culture problem. It will always be the task of the education system, from EY and upwards, to teach that skillset, and improvements can always be made. But beyond education, the solution may lie in "unlocking" a skillset rather than teaching it. But what that would involve is more of a "taking ownership of your own issues" approach.

[GrumbleDook]

I am skeptical as the 'problem solving' will be/is being taught by people with no 'problem solving' skills themselves, no real world ones anyway.

 

And so we get into a narrow view of what problem solving is and who can deliver the curriculum around it.

 

Ex-forces folk will probably remember the mantra of Improvise, Adapt, Overcome ... and the headache during basic training of *that* recruit who never seemed to get it ... we all had one in our platoon (troop/flight/etc.)

 

Not everyone gets it ... not everyone can join the dots between different scenarios.

 

As much as I hate the phrase "thinking outside the box", it is a good introduction to problem solving ... except you have to know what other boxes are out there and instead of thinking outside the box, you pull in ideas from other boxes! (And yes, there was a training exercise where you had to do exactly that ... to fix a situation you had to barter with other groups to get the right solution ... except there was no right solution ... they all had to be adapted!)

[Disease]

And so we get into a narrow view of what problem solving is and who can deliver the curriculum around it.

 

Ex-forces folk will probably remember the mantra of Improvise, Adapt, Overcome ... and the headache during basic training of *that* recruit who never seemed to get it ... we all had one in our platoon (troop/flight/etc.)

 

Not everyone gets it ... not everyone can join the dots between different scenarios.

 

Being an Ex-Royal Engineer myself I have a lot less tolerance of *that* recruit, especially in civvy street where in my experience they seem to be quite numerous

[GrumbleDook]

RE specialised in fixing problems though ... usually major problems like "the artillery did *what* to the bridge?"

[Disease]

RE specialised in fixing problems though ... usually major problems like "the artillery did *what* to the bridge?"

 

Either them or the damned tankies!

[Dos_Box]

It's a very strange concept that those born after a certain date are immigrants to modern technologies when by and large, they were the one that designed and built them.

As an exercise in thought, is there anything in IT or modern technologies in use today that wasn't either created by or built upon things designed by those born before 1980?

[sted]

It's a very strange concept that those born after a certain date are immigrants to modern technologies when by and large, they were the one that designed and built them.

As an exercise in thought, is there anything in IT or modern technologies in use today that wasn't either created by or built upon things designed by those born before 1980?

erm hard to answer as everything is built on everything else really so mobile phone = computer and theyve been around since the 40s, internet itself was 60/70s iirc as a darpa network closest is possibly www pages but in the end thats just a modified electronic newspaper or even ceefax which iirc was late 70s, dvd/blueray is just better vhs 70s(same as cd is just better records), digital tv is still tv as far as usage goes. Gets even worse looking at scifi/tv nobody could patent satellites because of archur c clarkes work, ipads/tablets were in tng and you could argue the hitchikers guide to the galaxy is a pretty good description of a tablet as well

 

i think its more younger people think the world "naturally" (for want of a better word) contains always on internet/wifi etc whereas us born earlier remember 28k modems (or slower) or even a time before the internet was really a thing so we can manage without it easier (not that id like to try but i bet id do better at it than a 20 something) because been there done that

[LeMarchand]

I have to agree that the 80s seems early for "digital natives"; unless we're talking the 2080s. Yep, the kids can text fast (if in gibberish) and can do certain things better than my Dad - but generally only the things that benefit them. Even then, many find it easier to want their logon credentials put in for them than check their typing.