2. students’ use of technology in formal and informal learning full report : http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/projectfinder/projects/pf2969lr
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this seminar at your University. Anyone who has been following the academic literature and mass media, will not have missed the amount of attention excited by the idea that a new generation of students is entering the educational system. It is claimed that this generation have sophisticated technical skills and cognitive capacities and that the educational system is not prepared to accommodate the needs of these so-called digital natives. The affordances of emerging social technologies themselves form a substantial part of this argument. The second generation web: brings about decentralisation of authority in knowledge creation and technology ownership; it allows users to generated, share and remix content and data at very low cost and without specialist skills The result of these developments, the argument goes, is widening of the gap between the culture of the educational institutions and learners’ lives outside universities. The actual situation however is far from clear, and much of the debate has largely remained at the level of rhetoric. In an attempt to introduce evidence-base to this debate, in the past years a number of empirical studies began to investigate young people’s experiences of using technologies. Today I would like to share with you the findings of one such empirical study that colleagues and I conducted last year.
