As many of you are aware, I spend a fair bit of time trying to debunk the myth of the so-called Digital Native. Here’s a link to a blogpost in the new Tech publication, The Kernel.

Boomers are tech-savvy, avid Internet users and multitask online while watching TV, says a recent report from eMarketer, Boomer Demographics and Media Usage. In the article, the author of the report Lisa E. Phillips points out that in their youth Boomers  “…eagerly adopted new technologies such as Walkmans, VCRs, PCs, DVRs and the Internet” .  In many cases this is true, and in earlier posts I have questioned the ‘Digital Native’ tag attached so frequently to Generation Y.  I’d go further than that too:  there are some very savvy Boomers out there, I speak from experience here, who came up the hard way through technology.  Many of them learned the basics of computing on command-line driven systems of various kinds, including DOS, and had to write short macros to get  office-style  applications to do anything remotely interesting.  Indeed for some of us it was dumb terminals on a mainframe.  We then got used to Windows/GUI WYSIWYG working, and started to work with ‘multimedia’, graphics, videos and sound, when applications were thin on the ground and processor power and RAM memory were low, and CD-ROM was the storage du jour.  To make things work, you had to know a fair bit about the underlying system, for workarounds and dodges.  And so it went on, as peer-to-peer networking and eventually the Internet became the norm.  Adopters expanded the capabilities of these technologies, through knowing quite  a bit about what went on underneath the interface – you just had to, to make early stuff work just that little bit harder.  So, yes, my settee looks a bit like mission control, as I mix TV, PC and smartphone, apps, location, cloud – looking forward to the next stage!

In a recent blogpost my colleague Lisa Harris presented an overview of the idea of the ‘digital native’, that is, someone who has grown up with the technology and uses it proficiently and naturally [How competent are new students with technology (really), www.lisaharrismarketing.com].  In the post, she shows that while there is some evidence for the existence of the digital native student, there is quite as much against.  She highlights that Bennett, Maton and Kevin (2008) consider that ‘it may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations’ (p779).

Indeed in our everyday experience (we work together in  the University of Southampton’s School of Management) we find many students, both postgraduate and undergraduate, who are quite weak in technology skills and reluctant to engage with new learning styles based around, say, social media. Underneath this debate, informal conversations with undergraduate students worry me – they seem at times to reveal an over-confidence in their skills (perhaps fuelled by the digital native discourse) that may not be justified in a fast-changing world where the use of social media and mobile communications is changing what is needed.  If universities are to respond to this, and support our students in their efforts to meet the needs of the job market, we need to be clear about what is meant by digital competence.  With that in mind, reflecting on all the conversations I produced the categorisation below:

In short, passives are quite adept with using technology to acquire and re-present information and communicate with others, using mobile phones, or sites such as Facebook.  Essentially they consume the outputs of others.  And they may do this very efficiently and effectively, although their usage tends to be largely at the individual level – they join and use group, but again not very proactively.  Creators however take things a little further – they produce material, perhaps uploading videos, soundfiles, acquire collections of bookmarks and perhaps keep a (regularly updated) blog.  They are more active users of say, Facebook, perhaps using it to organise events, rather than just tag along.  They may well network actively online, but largely among existing friends.  Disruptors are the most skilled, defined by their maintenance of a strong online personal identity; they may download applications to smartphones, develop new activities as a result, and use social media to bring in contacts and resources from outside their sphere of existing influence.

Experience suggests that there may be a pyramid here, with most students falling into the passive category, and only a few  aspiring to be disruptors. I would very much like to continue my research on this topic!!  What is worrying is that those in the passive category may consider themselves to be quite skilled.  This needs to be challenged if students are going to impress employers.  Just this Tuesday, I flew back from Guernsey sitting next to a guy from one of the town’s leading accountancy firms.  As we compared our views on the performance of our Blackberry Bold phones (yeah, I know) it was clear that he was expected as part of his everyday job to be able to download, and use new applications on a smartphone – this is not tomorrow in business, this is not for technologists, this is NOW.  We owe it to our students to take this agenda forward.  I’ll finish with a quote from Lisa, as I really couldn’t have put it better myself,

“At a time when universities face criticism for declining standards and graduate unemployment is at record levels, producing individuals with the skills, time and confidence to navigate and manage the online environment is increasingly important. Such students will stand out from the crowd by gaining access to new career opportunities, finding niche or potentially global audiences for their work, or enriching the lives of others. Those who do not display such initiative risk being marginalised or left behind.”

References

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L.(2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology 39/5 775-786

Harris, L. J., Warren, L., Leah, J. H. and Ashleigh, M. J. A. (2009), Small steps across the chasm: ideas for embedding a culture of open education in the university sector, OpenEd2009, August, Vancouver