Networks and locations for student learning

Abstract

This article examines the significance of place and location at a time when mobile and networked technologies allow students access from a diversity of contexts. The article reports a cultural probe exercise. Over a 24‐hour period, undergraduate students received SMS text messages and recorded answers to a fixed set of prompt questions using a small hand‐held video camera or a notebook. Our findings provide limited evidence of changes in student practices in relation to the adoption of mobile network access. Students still use the kinds of learning spaces they used 10 years ago despite the increased availability of wireless access to the internet and the increased ownership of mobile devices. An area where there has been significant change is in the social character of students’ engagements with networked technologies and the integration of the mobile phone, social networking and other social technologies into the everyday fabric of student life.

Keywords:

• Net Generation
• Digital Natives
• millennials
• student experience
• learning spaces
• higher education

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article (‘Net Generation students: Agency and choice and the new technologies’) was presented at the Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg, Denmark, May 2010. The research reported in this article was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant RES‐062‐23‐0971). We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of our collaborators at the five participating universities, in particular Susan Armitage, Martin Jenkins, Sheila French, Ann Qualter and Tunde Varga‐Atkins.