A new generation of learners? The Net Generation and Digital Natives

This special issue brings together researchers who have been investigating young people who are often described as Net Generation or Digital Native learners (Tapscott 1998, 2009; Prensky 2001; Palfrey and Gasser 2008). The issue has been developed from articles first delivered in a symposium at the networked learning conference held in Alborg in May 2010 (Jones 2010). The argument for the Net Generation and Digital Native theses is that there is a clear generational break and that young people have:

… not just changed incrementally from those of the past … A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a ‘singularity’ – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. (Prensky 2001, 1)

The research reported in this issue takes a critical stance in relation to the idea of a generational break between a new generation of young learners and older learners described as Digital Immigrants. The articles report from a variety of contexts with significant variations in both geographical and age range.

The popularized argument brings together a number of separable arguments. A key argument is that there is a new generation emerging from those young people who have been ‘bathed in bits and bytes’ since birth (Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Tapscott 2009). These young people have grown up with the internet and web, in an environment that is infused with digital technologies. The claim is made that this material context has led to young people developing a natural aptitude and high skill levels in relation to the new technologies. Those older people who grew up in an analogue world prior to the new technologies are portrayed as always being behind, as being immigrants to this new world and never likely to reach the levels of skill and fluency developed naturally by those who have grown up with new digital technologies. Palfrey and Gasser offer a slightly more nuanced view suggesting that the term generation is an overstatement and preferring to call the new cohort a population instead (2008, 14). This sleight of hand is difficult to accept as the title of their book is Born digital and subtitled Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives. The population they identify is one with access to technology, so not a universal condition, and dependent upon a learned digital literacy. If being part of the population they identify as Digital Natives is learned I am not sure what sense there is in retaining the idea of being a native. Can older people join the native population if they have access to technology and networks and if they learn the new literacies? If so the term Digital Native is at best misleading and it may need to be abandoned in both popular and scientific writing.

The issue of technological change and the way it affects young people is important to networked e‐learning because these claims include specific claims about approaches to learning in the new generation. The young learner is characterized as having known qualities that apply to all young people. The language used about them is quite definite and contains few qualifications. For example, Tapscott writes:

In education they [the Net generation] are forcing a change in the model of pedagogy, from a teacher‐focused approach based on instruction to a student‐focused model based on collaboration. (2009, 11)

The language is firm and direct and the claim is that like it or not a new generation is forcing change and the character of that change is student – focused and based on collaboration. Tapscott is not alone and Palfrey and Gasser have a similar message using Prensky’s term Digital Natives:

In order for schools to adapt to the habits of Digital Natives and how they are processing information, educators need to accept that the mode of learning is changing rapidly in a digital age … Learning itself has undergone a transformation over the past 30 years … For Digital Natives, research is more likely to mean Google search than a trip to the library. They are more likely to check Wikipedia. (Palfrey and Gasser 2008, 239)

Although Palfrey and Gasser adopt a more sophisticated approach, trying to re‐appropriate the term Digital Native, the language they use remains highly directive. Schools need to ‘adapt’. Educators ‘need to accept’ and learning has ‘undergone a transformation’. In this determinist rhetoric there is little room for doubt or critical thinking about the direction and necessity of change. Although these arguments are not new, and it is over 10 years since the first major publications began to mark out the terrain in this way, the arguments remain influential (Tapscott 1998; Howe and Strauss 2000; Prensky 2001). This is despite a growing body of evidence that the changes in young people are far more complex and poorly understood (see, e.g., Kennedy et al. 2008; Bullen et al. 2009; Pedró 2009; Hargittai 2010; Jones et al. 2010). The arguments for such a change have also been criticized from a more theoretical stance (e.g., Buckingham and Willet 2006; Bayne and Ross 2007; Bennett, Maton, and Kervin 2008). Despite this growing criticism policy‐makers continue to adopt generational arguments. For example, the then Vice Chancellor of the Open University (UK) speaking to the university council:

Most of our students, moreover, are part of what we now describe as the Net Generation. This is a generation who think IM, text and Google are verbs not applications. (Brenda Gourley, VC Open University [UK], 26 September 2008)

At the time when the Vice Chancellor was speaking, the Open University (UK) was recruiting about 20% of its first‐level students under the age of 25, so 80% of the Open University recruitment was older than the age group usually defined as the Net Generation.

The material basis for the existence of a Net Generation of Digital Natives, in pervasive digital networks and access to computers, certainly exists in advanced industrial countries and it is increasingly influential in rapidly developing economies (Czerniewicz and Brown 2010; Shao 2010). In the past 10 years the rise of broadband connectivity to the internet has allowed a rapid growth of new internet‐ and web‐based services. Mobile technologies and the convergence of the internet with mobile telecommunications and 3G networks has allowed for a new range of portable devices allowing for access to the internet on the move (Castells et al. 2007). The articles in this issue paint a complex picture of change amongst young people, a picture at odds with the idea of a Net Generation composed of Digital Natives. They address the ways that leisure and study activities intertwine and suggest new methods for research need to be adopted to complement the predominantly survey methods currently deployed. The articles show that young people at school and university use technologies in ways that are related to their purposes and exhibit a diversity that contrasts with the idea of a sharp generational change. The articles agree that there are significant age‐related changes but they suggest that these changes are mediated by the active appropriation of technology by young people who act purposively and in relation to influential institutional contexts.