Curating the use of digital media in higher education: a case study

ABSTRACT

Digital technology constitutes a substantial presence in higher education and notions like ‘digital natives’ and ‘21st century digital skills’ dominate educational discourse. However, within the last decade, scholars have started questioning the prevailing techno-optimism and practitioners have started debating whether and how to regulate the use of digital devices. Based on a systematic qualitative analysis of 100 written evaluations and mapping sessions with five students, this study explores students’ experiences in an undergraduate course in which the teacher restricted the use of digital devices in discussion classes. We found that students expressed mostly positive attitudes towards resulting class engagement and mostly negative attitudes towards taking, sharing, and searching their notes. Finally, we discuss our findings based on the notion of media affordances.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational technology
• digital natives
• media affordances
• discussion classes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kim Jesper Herrmann

Kim Jesper Herrmann is Head of Study at the Department of Marketing, Digital Development and Design. His research focuses on student-teacher interaction as well as socio-cultural research on micro-cultures in academic departments.

Katrine Lindvig

Katrine Lindvig is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. Her main area of research is interdisciplinarity and the use of digital tools in teaching at various educational levels. She holds a PhD in University Science Education and has an interdisciplinary background in Educational Studies and International Development Studies from Roskilde University. She is currently part of a project studying the use of it in the Vocational Education and Training sector.

Jesper Aagaard

Jesper Aagaard is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Aarhus University, Denmark. His research is currently focusing on the use of digital devices in school classrooms – with a specific interest in the phenomenon known as digital distraction.