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Faculty of Education - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities
1-1-2010
Beyond the 'digital natives' debate: towards a more nuanced understanding Beyond the 'digital natives' debate: towards a more nuanced understanding
of students' technology experiences of students' technology experiences
Susan J. Bennett
University of Wollongong
, sbennett@uow.edu.au
Karl A. Maton
kmaton@uow.edu.au
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Bennett, Susan J. and Maton, Karl A.: Beyond the 'digital natives' debate: towards a more nuanced
understanding of students' technology experiences 2010, 321-331.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/edupapers/1015
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Beyond the ‘digital natives’ debate: Towards a more nuanced understanding of
students’ technology experiences
Sue Bennett, Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong
Karl Maton, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Faulty of Arts, University of
Sydney
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[0] Abstract
The idea of ‘the digital natives’, a generation of tech-savvy young people immersed in
digital technologies for which current education systems cannot cater, has gained
widespread popularity on the basis of claims rather than evidence. Recent research
has shown flaws in the argument that there is an identifiable generation, or even a
single type of highly adept technology user. For educators, the diversity revealed by
these studies provides valuable insights into students’ experiences of technology
inside and outside formal education. While this body of work provides a preliminary
understanding, it also highlights subtleties and complexities that require further
investigation. It suggests, for example, that we must go beyond simple dichotomies
evident in the digital native debate to develop a more sophisticated understanding of
our students’ experiences of technology. Using a review of recent research findings as
a starting point, this paper identifies some key issues for educational researchers,
offers new ways of conceptualising key ideas using theoretical constructs from
Castells, Bourdieu and Bernstein, and makes a case for how we need to develop the
debate in order to advance our understanding.
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[1] Introduction
The idea that technology changes our lives profoundly is so ubiquitous in public
discourse that it has become almost cliché. Both within and without the academy
claims abound that technology is changing more rapidly than at any other time in
human history. Often such claims convey a sense of urgency, pressing us to keep up
with changes and raising concerns that some in our societies are being left behind.
Cartoons humorously depict the gap between young people who have grown up with
technology and an older generation for whom it appears to be a mystery or threat.
Utopian visions of a brave new world unlocked by technological changes that
promote greater equality and participation proliferate. What underpins all of these
conceptions of modern life is the idea that advances in technology are creating
societal changes which require new approaches and practices. Education, it is
claimed, is a key arena for radical change.
Claims about change are common in social science. One can find a surfeit of
‘singularities’, one-off events viewed as revolutionary. Beniger (1986) lists seventy-
five distinct names coined between 1950 and 1985 to describe such change.
Fundamental social change, for example, has been variously described as creating a
status society, service society, postindustrial society, postmodern society, knowledge
society, and so on. Similarly, generations of students have been regularly described as
fundamentally dissimilar - Babyboomers, Generation X, Generation Y, etc. - and are
ascribed different characteristics. Indeed, moral panics over ‘new’ students are a
recurrent phenomenon in education (Hickox & Moore, 1995). During the late
nineteenth century, for example, the expansion of formal state education was
accompanied by concerns over the entry of middle-class and female students (Lowe,
1987). Similarly, policy debates in higher education during the early 1960s focused
on the knowledge, interests and aptitudes of new, working-class students that
expansion was expected to bring into universities (Maton, 2004). Current debates over
the implications of technological change for education are similar in focusing another,
supposedly new kind of learner.
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The argument is that radical change in education is needed because our traditional
institutions do not meet the needs of a new generation of ‘tech-savvy’ learners. These
young people are said to be different to all generations that have gone before because
they think, behave and learn differently as a result of continuous, pervasive exposure
to modern technology. Various labels have been applied to these young people, but
the two most common are ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001) and ‘the Net Generation’
(Tapscott, 1998). A key feature of the conception of young people as ‘digital natives’
is the apparently insurmountable gap between them and the less technologically
literate older generations. The argument made is that “The single biggest problem
facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an
outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population
that speaks an entirely new language” (Prensky, 2001, p. 2).
This idea has excited a great deal of interest in the educational community and been
widely taken up by commentators and researchers (eg. Barnes, Marateo, & Pixy
Ferris, 2007; Downes, 2005; Toledo, 2007). Despite recent empirical evidence
undermining claims about profound age-related differences in technology use and
practices (eg., see other papers in this special issue), and moves by the original
authors to distance themselves from their original claims (eg. Prensky, 2009), the idea
put forward of a fundamental gap between the technologically skilled and unskilled
persists. The slightly modified version of the argument posits that there exists a
portion of the population who are highly adept technology users and that these people
are fundamentally different in their behaviours and preferences to those who are not
because of their use of technology (Dede, 2005; Oblinger, 2005). So while this
assertion no longer excludes older people with sufficient exposure to digital
technologies, there is still an assumption that younger people are naturally more tech
savvy. Thus, while it may be argued that some have moved on from simple
conceptions of an age-based divide, an undercurrent of technological determinism
persists in debates.
This paper sets aside the issue of generational differences, and focuses on claims
made about young people and their technology experiences, because it is these claims
that are driving the debate about educational change. There are varied views about
young people’s use of technology, ranging from expressions of grave concern about