"Effortful": Educating the Net Generation - A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy

Phil Candy, who is, sadly (for people in the UK....), back in Australia , sent me a copy of Educating the Net Generation - A Handbook of Findings for Practice and Policy, 2009 [6 MB PDF], published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.  The following extract explains the approach taken, and there is an informative project web site.

Individual sections of the report are available from here.

"This project sought to further understand the characteristics of the so-called Net Generation of students entering Australian universities. The project team took a critical approach to this issue – moving beyond opinion, rhetoric and anecdote – and sought to contribute to the emerging evidence-base in this area.

The project sought to investigate the technological experiences of Australian first-year university students and examine the proposed technological literacy gap between these students and the staff who teach them. Data were also collected from both students and staff on how useful an array of technologies was perceived to be in university teaching and learning.

Then, using the results of these investigations as a backdrop, the project team considered how emerging Web 2.0 technologies could be effectively employed in learning and teaching contexts in Higher Education. With local support, the members of the project team designed and then implemented a range of technology-based learning activities and collected detailed information about these implementations. Using this approach the project sought to identify the implications educating the Net Generation has forlearning and teaching in Australian universities."

Here are the handbook's six headline findings, taken from the executive summary.

1. The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported.

2. There is great diversity in students’ and staff experiences with technology, and their preferences for the use of technology in higher education.

3. Emerging technologies afford a range of learning activities that can improve student learning processes, outcomes, and assessment practices.

4. Managing and aligning pedagogical, technical and administrative issues is a necessary condition of success when using emerging technologies for learning.

5. Innovation with learning technologies typically requires the development of new learning and teaching and technology-based skills, which is effortful for both students and staff.

6. The use of emerging technologies for learning and teaching can challenge current university policies in learning and teaching and IT.

Comments

[Mark Bullen]

This is an excellent resource and part of a growing body of evidence that highlights how the prevailing net generation discourse is based on hype not fact. For more on this, check out http://netgenskeptic.com