The net generation and digital natives: implications for higher education

Executive Summary "Our students have changed radically. Today�s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." (Prensky 2001 p1) 1. There is no evidence that there is a single new generation of young students entering Higher Education and the terms Net Generation and Digital Native do not capture the processes of change that are taking place. 2. The complex changes that are taking place in the student body have an age related component that is most obvious with the newest waves of technology. Prominent amongst these are the uses made of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), uploading and manipulation of multimedia (e.g. YouTube) and the use of handheld devices to access the mobile Internet. 3. Demographic factors interact with age to pattern students� responses to new technologies. The most important of these are gender, mode of study (distance or place-based) and the international or home status of the student. 4. The gap between students and their teachers is not fixed, nor is the gulf so large that it cannot be bridged. In many ways the relationship is determined by the requirements teachers place upon their students to make use of new technologies and the way teachers integrate new technologies in their courses. There is little evidence that students enter university with demands for new technologies that teachers and universities cannot meet. 5. Students persistently report that they prefer moderate use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their courses. Care should be taken with this finding because the interpretation of what is �moderate� use of ICT may be changing as a range of new technologies take off and become embedded in social life and universities. 6. Universities should be confident in the provision of what might seem to be basic services. Students appreciate and make use of the foundational infrastructure for learning, even where this is often criticised as being an out of date and unimaginative use of new technology. Virtual Learning Environments (Learning or Course Management Systems) are used widely and seem to be well regarded. The provision by university libraries of online services, including the provision of online e-journals and e-books, are also positively received. 7. Students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the most discussed new technologies such as Blogs, Wikis and 3D Virtual Worlds. The use of 3D Virtual Worlds is notably low amongst students. The use of Wikis and Blogs is relatively low overall, but use does vary between different contexts, including national and regional contexts. Students who are required to use these technologies in their courses are unlikely to reject them and low use does not imply that they are inappropriate for educational use. The key point being made is that there is not a natural demand amongst students that teaching staff and universities should feel obliged to satisfy. 8. There is no obvious or consistent demand from students for changes to pedagogy at university (e.g. demands for team and group working). There may be good reasons why teachers and universities wish to revise their approaches to teaching and learning, or may wish to introduce new ways of working. Students will respond positively to changes in teaching and learning strategies that are well conceived, well explained and properly embedded in courses and degree programmes. However there is no evidence of a pent-up demand amongst students for changes in pedagogy or of a demand for greater collaboration. 9. There is no evidence of a consistent demand from students for the provision of highly individualised or personal university services. The development of university infrastructures, such as new kinds of learning environments (for example Personal Learning Environments) should be choices about the kinds of provision that the university wishes to make and not a response to general statements about what a new generation of students are demanding. 10. Advice derived from generational arguments should not be used by government and government agencies to promote changes in university structure designed to accommodate a Net Generation of Digital Natives. The evidence indicates that young students do not form a generational cohort and they do not express consistent or generationally organised demands. A key finding of this review is that political choices should be made explicit and not disguised by arguments about generational change

Supporting collocation learning with a digital library

Extensive knowledge of collocations is a key factor that distinguishes learners from fluent native speakers. Such knowledge is difficult to acquire simply because there is so much of it. This paper describes a system that exploits the facilities offered by digital libraries to provide a rich collocation-learning environment. The design is based on three processes that have been identified as leading to lexical acquisition: noticing, retrieval and generation. Collocations are automatically identified in input documents using natural language processing techniques and used to enhance the presentation of the documents and also as the basis of exercises, produced under teacher control, that amplify students' collocation knowledge. The system uses a corpus of 1.3 B short phrases drawn from the web, from which 29 M collocations have been automatically identified. It also connects to examples garnered from the live web and the British National Corpus

Culture as Non-Consensus: Exploring Coherence Among Native Speakers’ Perceptions of German Expressions of Affection

From early in their learning experience, foreign language (FL) learners at American universities explore socio-cultural connotations that, it is argued, are signified by FL words. Textbook authors and teachers follow an implicit canon of difference, a list of iconic words that over time—and without the benefit of empirical evidence—have come to represent essential differences in outlook between their native and the FL culture (Kubota, 2004). Despite the fast progression of the theory of teaching culture in FL learning (Kramsch, 2015; Risager, 2015), large empirical gaps remain. Todate, there is little evidence that native speakers (NSs) of the FL perceive their cultural practices, including the cultural contexts in which language is used, homogenously enough to warrant their status as cultural traits. Using the example of expressions of affection, this exploratory study drew on qualitative and quantitative questionnaire data to investigate whether German NSs’ (N=52) accounts of their own and of most fellow Germans’ language behavior converged enough to derive a comprehensive and reliable cultural norm. Results indicated a lack of consensus among German NSs’ self-reported views, eluding the assumption of a pertinent community-specific norm. Implications for FL teaching and learning, as well as directions for future research, are discussed

'First Portal in a Storm': A Virtual Space for Transition Students

The lives of millennial students are epitomised by ubiquitous information, merged technologies, blurred social-study-work boundaries, multitasking and hyperlinked online interactions (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). These characteristics have implications for the design of online spaces that aim to provide virtual access to course materials, administrative processes and support information, all of which is required by students to steer a course through the storm of their transition university experience. Previously we summarised the challenges facing first year students (Kift & Nelson, 2005) and investigated their current online engagement patterns, which revealed three issues for consideration when designing virtual spaces (Nelson, Kift & Harper, 2005). In this paper we continue our examination of students’ interactions with online spaces by considering the perceptions and use of technology by millennial students as well as projections for managing the virtual learning environments of the future. The findings from this analysis are informed by our previous work to conceptualise and describe the architecture of a transition portal

Mobile Learning Revolution: Implications for Language Pedagogy

Mobile technologies including cell phones and tablets are a pervasive feature of everyday life with potential impact on teaching and learning. “Mobile pedagogy” may seem like a contradiction in terms, since mobile learning often takes place physically beyond the teacher's reach, outside the walls of the classroom. While pedagogy implies careful planning, mobility exposes learners to the unexpected. A thoughtful pedagogical response to this reality involves new conceptualizations of what is to be learned and new activity designs. This approach recognizes that learners may act in more self-determined ways beyond the classroom walls, where online interactions and mobile encounters influence their target language communication needs and interests. The chapter sets out a range of opportunities for out-of-class mobile language learning that give learners an active role and promote communication. It then considers the implications of these developments for language content and curricula and the evolving roles and competences of teachers

Akin House Curriculum Development and Living History Programming

This unit plan is comprised of a variety of inquiry-based lessons that explore the culture and way of life of the Native Americans who occupied New England. After studying the Akin house documents, materials, and narratives, I chose to focus my unit on the land and the people who came before the Akin family so that students will learn the long-view of our rich New England history

Second language learning in the context of MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses are becoming popular educational vehicles through which universities reach out to non-traditional audiences. Many enrolees hail from other countries and cultures, and struggle to cope with the English language in which these courses are invariably offered. Moreover, most such learners have a strong desire and motivation to extend their knowledge of academic English, particularly in the specific area addressed by the course. Online courses provide a compelling opportunity for domain-specific language learning. They supply a large corpus of interesting linguistic material relevant to a particular area, including supplementary images (slides), audio and video. We contend that this corpus can be automatically analysed, enriched, and transformed into a resource that learners can browse and query in order to extend their ability to understand the language used, and help them express themselves more fluently and eloquently in that domain. To illustrate this idea, an existing online corpus-based language learning tool (FLAX) is applied to a Coursera MOOC entitled Virology 1: How Viruses Work, offered by Columbia University