Via the New York Times “Idea of the Day” blog we discover this pointer to a recent article in The Economist highlighting skeptics of the whole “Digital Native” idea, in short the idea that the generation who came of age surrounded by digital tools are fundamentally different than older generations in the way they think, learn, communicate, and express themselves.
The idea makes sense, of course, given that we recognize the massive cultural and cognitive shift that took place with the advent of widespread alphabetic literacy (which–let’s be honest–didn’t happen that long ago in human history: maybe a few hundred years). However, the available empirical evidence just doesn’t support the notion of a generation of digital natives who all share levels of expertise and proficiency that other generations lack. See, for instance, the following article from last month’s Sociological Inquiry by Eszter Hargittai: “Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the ‘Net Generation’.” Hargittai concludes that “even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.”
My concern is that by embracing the ill-defined notion of “digital natives,” those who teach this generation (and subsequent generations) will assume levels of expertise and experience–among all of their students–that simply don’t exist in such an evenly distributed way. As a result, opportunities for teaching critical skills will be lost. Also, by overlooking the factors that can hinder a young person’s digital proficiency–which are largely the same factors that hinder traditional literacy–we overlook the inequities our students face in their upbringing, their education, their communities. As a result, we overlook opportunities for correcting those inequities. And finally, feeding our students the myth of “digital natives” gives them a false sense of confidence about their use and understanding of their digital environment.
Try a simple experiment. Ask your students these two questions: “1. How does the Google search engine work? 2. Who owns the exclusive rights to the pictures you’ve uploaded to Facebook?” My guess (and I could be wrong) is that a statistically insignificant percentage of your students will know the right answer.
What do you think?
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Cristóbal Cobo Romaní]
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9 Responses to Digital Natives? Naive!
Doug - March 9, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Also, on many campuses, a substantial proportion of students are of older, non-digital generations, and with the current economy many of those of lower SES and lower computer knowledge / familiarity / comfort are turning up in classes.
Jonathan Dresner - March 9, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Unfortunately, the “digital native” meme is deeply ingrained in our academic managerial culture. We just got done with a round of campus visits for both a Provost (VPAA) and CIO position, and every one of them, almost without exception, gave us some variation on the “kids today are different” schtick. We got everything from the “Did You Know” video to stories of preteen texting.
Meanwhile, my students can’t navigate the library website to find journal articles, or check the course blog on a regular basis.
Alec Hosterman - March 9, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Having taught digital immigrants, digital settlers, and digital natives, I will say that from my experience there is a difference in their approach to technology and its uses. DNs feel more akin to the technology because it is far more prevalent in their lives than it was in ours (yes, that’s a sweeping generalization – bear with me). But what I’ve found is that even though DNs know how to use the tech, they don’t know how to harness it effectively. They multitask but don’t know how to parallel process. In this, I’ve found that educators have expected them to know it and therefore haven’t taught them effective from ineffective ways. I teach a 400 level new media course and the most common response: “wow, I wish I knew this my freshman year – it would have made some projects easier.”
Maybe students don’t know how to navigate a library website because they haven’t been shown how to do it effectively. And maybe some students prefer different learning styles (visual over lecture) – that’s why teaching adults is far different than teaching traditional-age students. Skill sets need to be learned and practiced in order to become effective.
Again, this is just my experience and opinion. I know each of us has a different outlook on this issue and I respect that. It’s difficult to create a universal experience we all can relate too. However, I do think the DN, DI, and DS labels are relatively accurate to some extent – much like Baby Boomer, Hippie, Gen X, Gen Y, etc. labels act for other generations.
Laura - March 10, 2010 at 7:25 am
I agree with Alec. What I’ve found is traditional aged college students are willing to approach the technology more than, say, a non-traditional student or faculty member, but they only know the surface of how technology works. I often do a mini-lecture on how Google works so that they understand its lack of objectivity compared to how a library database works. And we talk about copyright and ownership a lot.
I’ve yet to have a class where more than one or two students know what RSS is or who use an RSS reader on a regular basis. Even fewer use bookmarking tools. Basically, most use Facebook, watch YouTube/Hulu, and text, but have no idea about the deeper uses of technology.
Tanya Roth - March 10, 2010 at 10:07 am
Thanks for this. I think it’s important to not assume any level of knowledge among students. Just because they grew up with it doesn’t necessarily mean that much. I still get plenty of first and second year undergrads who will say they (A) would never touch Facebook (for example) and/or (B) know facebook, but can’t navigate other systems, and what the heck is Google Docs? (them, not me). Last year, I introduced Zotero to a senior who’d never seen it (but that’s not surprising because a lot of undergrads I know don’t seem to move in the circles to get info on new systems like Zotero).
I’m in my fifth-year of a PhD program, and my colleagues in the program run the gammut from early 20s (fresh out of undergrad) to mid-30s. In that group, you also can’t assume anything about our technical knowledge. Some of us are very tech-savvy; others can use email and nothing more.
But I also dislike assumptions that there’s a gap – due to generational “stuff” – between undergrads and “us” (technologically speaking). I was at a wonderful talk a few months ago where this “generation gap” between undergrads and faculty was stressed far too much in my opinion: I think it scared the non-tech-savvy faculty (which were most of the people in the room). This was a full audience, and clearly, the faculty came because they wanted to learn about this “social media” stuff – but stressing the “gap” seemed to only scare people and reinforce stereotypes they already have – usually negative ones.
Dr. Virago - March 10, 2010 at 1:10 pm
I think this is spot-on, George, especially with regards to socioeconomic status and in terms of the problems of fostering overconfidence. Your two test questions are perfect, too. Many of my students would not be able to answer either.
I’m not as tech savvy as you and the other Prof Hacker writers, but I’m a lot more tech savvy than most of my students. The other day I was showing my Middle English students how to use the Middle English Dictionary effectively. Part of the trick of that is knowing how Middle English works (what the range of possibilities are for its non-standardized spellings are, what the common morphology is for various parts of speech, etc.) and I’ve been teaching that in the class. They’re getting that, but they’re having all sorts of trouble because they don’t understand how the search mechanism works. And that’s because when you search with Google, it does some of the analysis for you; although you’ll get more precise results with Boolean operators, you don’t have to use them. But with the MED, you need to use truncation, etc., effectively. Too much truncation, for example, and you get way too many hits to sort through.
But they lack knowledge of the simple stuff, too. I had a word and its quotations displayed on a page, and I wanted to find all the citations from Chaucer. And so I used the “find” function. I did it with the mouse and the drop-down menus of my browser (Firefox, in this case) to make it obvious (rather than use Ctrl+F). And after I did it, one of my students said, “Cool! How did you do that?”
And over and over my grad students ask me questions that are answered on the web site, but they tell me they can’t find it on the website. This comes from the 20-something students as much, if not more than, the non-trad students. And I can’t tell you how many times students say, “Oh, but I don’t check my campus e-mail, only my hotmail.” (Yes, they use hotmail. And Yahoo. Rarely gmail.) “So set your campus mail to forward to the account you do check,” I say. “I can do that?” they answer incredulously.
I realize this is all anecdotal, but at my regional public, I’ve yet to encounter a true digital literacy among the English and English-Ed students I teach. (It might be different elsewhere on the campus.)
Your analogy to alphabetical/reading literacy is a good one, because even the students who use a lot of tech and feel comfortable with it don’t necessarily use it well or to its full potential. Likewise, they may be native English speakers who got decent passing grades in high school English, but they don’t know why their choppy, paratactic sentences aren’t as logically forceful as hypotactic sentences with subordination and subordinating conjunctions would be. In other words, they use the tech as they use their native language – passively and unconsciousness, without analyzing what it’s doing or how it’s working. We shouldn’t be assuming a higher level of knowledge of it from anyone, even if they do have a higher level of comfort with it, just as we don’t assume our native English speakers don’t need to take composition. If we want them to become truly literate, proficient users of technology, we need to teach them.
R. Geurtz - March 10, 2010 at 10:33 pm
I couldn’t agree more and I am delighted to see someone else talk about the lack of technical literacy among our digital natives. My high schools students are digital natives only in the sense that they are comfortable PLAYING with technology (facebook, games, youtube watching, downloading songs) – I want to clarify -it is important to play. When it comes to using technology to create educationally or commercially viable products, they are, in fact, at a disadvantage compared to digital immigrants.
I often compare my young technology students to young drivers – they look like they’re in control and knowledgeable – but they aren’t. Insurance companies don’t want to insure teenagers for any amount of money because they have the statistics! So, what are we as educational researchers doing to understand the level of technical literacy and then providing the education for developing technical literacy?
Miles - March 11, 2010 at 1:14 pm
I also wonder whether social media have dumbed-down deeper technological (and visual) literacy in some ways. 10 years ago, I saw lots of students engaging with the back-end of online media as they learned html and made web sites. Now, they just type text in a box, and the medium (blog, wiki, twitter, etc.) does all the rest.
Ersin Akinci - March 14, 2010 at 12:24 am
The fundamental problem with these “empirical” studies is that they are rather poor at gaging the incredibly deep subjective changes underway in both our cognition and our emotions thanks to the spread of digital technology. All of them continue to treat books and computers as if they were merely information tools that communicate, store, and manipulate data (Socrates makes the same mistake in the Phaedrus when he derides writing as merely an “aid to reminiscence”), whereas any given information technology is much more than just a tool. It is a world unto itself with its own autonomous spiritual power, one that nourishes and enriches us like nothing else. No study will capture what any veteran book reader can tell you, that books will subsume and transform your very being.
Now, the problem with computers is that as they supplant “real books” (paper codices) as information tools they still lack the artistic quality of books. That is, computers are often used to generate art (again, used as a tool), but no one has really figured out how to make computer systems themselves as art (oh, how we take the long and torturous history of the book for granted!) Until that happens, my generation will differ from their forebears in that they will lack their own literature and the same capacity to understand it.
I’ve written quite a lot about this at my blog, “What Digital Revolution?” (http://www.whatdigitalrevolution.com), which I invite you to visit. Thanks a lot for this post: it’s good to hear others thinking about these issues.