Deconstructing Digital Natives

Young People, Technology, and the New Literacies

Michael Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415889933
• eBook ISBN: 9781136738999
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

There have been many attempts to define the generation of students who emerged with the Web and new digital technologies in the early 1990s. The term "digital native" refers to the generation born after 1980, which has grown up in a world where digital technologies and the internet are a normal part of everyday life. Young people belonging to this generation are therefore supposed to be "native" to the digital lifestyle, always connected to the internet and comfortable with a range of cutting-edge technologies.

Deconstructing Digital Natives offers the most balanced, research-based view of this group to date. Existing studies of digital natives lack application to specific disciplines or conditions, ignoring the differences of educational fields and gender. How, and how much, are learners changing in the digital age? How can a more pluralistic understanding of these learners be developed? Contributors to this volume produce an international overview of developments in digital literacy among today's young learners, offering innovative ways to steer a productive path between traditional narratives that offer only complete acceptance or total dismissal of digital natives.

1 Technology, Education, and the Discourse of the Digital Native

Between Evangelists and Dissenters

Michael Thomas

DOI: 10.4324/9780203818848-1

From Plato to Web 2.0, new technologies have always attracted both passionate advocates as well as an active dissenting tradition. Advocates, variously identified as technoevangelists, technoromantics, or enlightenment thinkers have long had to contend with the verbal or even physically destructive response of techno phobes, antimodernists, or luddites. During the Industrial Revolution in England, factory owners installed mechanical looms to improve production but were perceived as threatening employment and causing a massive change in social relations. Luddites damaged and destroyed industrial machinery as an act of self-preservation. Two hundred years later, the Internet has brought greater global access to information, education, and commerce than ever before, but these benefits have to be balanced against cybercrime, cyber-bullying, information over load, violent video games, copyright infringement, and 24/7 online pornography.

While Warschauer argues new technologies are “bringing about a shift in literacy practices as dramatic as any since the development of the printing press” (2006, p. ix), it is not unusual to see self-proclaimed “digital luddites” (Young, 2010) lamenting the need to escape the constant and disruptive interference of email or hear them telling their students to switch off their mobile phones and laptop computers as they enter classrooms (Mortkowitz, 2010). Some have banned the use of Google, Wikipedia and social media applications in classrooms (Chiles, 2008), while other professors have achieved momentary notoriety by dismantling wireless hubs during lectures, as they can no longer contend with the distractions laptops pose. Whereas faculty often argue that banning laptops makes students more attentive in content-based classes, students at the University of Memphis Law School reacted by signing a petition protesting to the American Bar Association, claiming that they had been denied the technology for an “up-to-date education” (Young, 2006). For these students attending a western university in the first decade of the new millennium, digital technologies and the Internet have become a “normalized” and expected part of their daily learning experience (Thomas, 2011). This is far from an expectation or reality elsewhere, however.

While young people attend school and university in the west, often lamenting the weight of their laptops in their rucksacks or the slow speed of their micro-processors, at the same time some children in Asia and South America peer at the Internet through a hole in the wall of their shanty town (Mitra, 2006), use a networked $100 laptop designed by MIT, or, more probably, have never seen such technologies, never mind used them.

The conflicts and contrasts noted above are nothing new. In fact, the history of technology has often been characterized by a debate between uncritical romantics and dismissive skeptics. Neither position, however, is an effective response to the opportunities and challenges new technologies present; both in turn often exaggerate or downplay the impact of technology, and this leads to entrenched positions and polarization. In the sphere of education in particular, such entrenched positions can be harmful and produce simplistic forms of analysis, their popularity due to the fact that they are often more exciting, easily digestible, and media-friendly than the highly differentiated analysis produced by careful, longitudinal research. In the field of educational technology, driven as it is by rapid changes in hardware and software, it is difficult to get excited about a research report that takes two years to write, especially as the technology in question may have changed dramatically in the intervening time. Advocates of technology integration in education must therefore attempt to understand the discourses that drive it and, in some cases, harm its acceptance, and find a balance between the technological innovations that can be sustained by sound pedagogy and those driven more by commercial interests.

Beginning with an entry in 2005, Wikipedia contains a definition of “technology evangelist,” a term that appropriately perhaps conjures up images of the almost religious intensity displayed sometimes by technology vendors bringing a new product to market, supported more recently in the age of Web 2.0 digital applications by an army of bloggers, podcasters, and, latterly, tweeters. Witness in this respect the reception of the iPhone as well as the educational debate about the wisdom of investing in interactive whiteboards before there has been sufficient time for teachers to teach with them or researchers to research them. A technoevangelist, then, can be regarded as

a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market … Professional technology evangelists are often employed by firms which seek to establish their proprietary technologies as de facto standards or to participate in setting non-proprietary open standards. Non-professional technology evangelists may act out of altruism or self-interest (e.g., to gain the benefits of early adoption or the network effect).

(Wikipedia, 2010, n.p.)

This striking definition has a particular resonance in the age of the “network society” and the “knowledge economy,” where technology evangelists have become particularly prominent in many areas of education, promising to “transform” and “revolutionize” pedagogy using a variety of devices, all the way from digital television to the Nintendo DS and the Apple iPad.

One of the most important terms used by technoevangelists to promote digital technologies and the so-called “transformation of learning”—the digital native— is the subject of this book. Over the last decade the “Digital Native,” a description now typically identified by marketers with a young person who has grown up with digital technologies and the Internet as ever-present parts of their lives, has been the subject of a number of popular books including Growing up Digital (Tapscott, 1998), Born Digital (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), Grown up Digital (Tapscott, 2009), and Teaching Digital Natives (Prensky, 2010), to name but a few high profile examples. Like it or not—and increasingly many academics who emphasize the need for a research-led approach to technology integration in education do not— “Digital Natives” has retained a powerful and enduring if, albeit, problematical resonance since Prensky popularized it in his essay, “Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants” (2001a, 2001b), following Barlow's (1996) earlier usage.

One decade later the term causes disdain as well as fervent acceptance. Some researchers have been asked to remove all trace of the term from academic papers submitted to conferences in order to be seriously considered for inclusion. At the same time in other parts of the world, whole conferences are still being organized in which the assumptions about digital natives are an integral part— witness for example the New England Regional Association for Language Learning Technology (NERALLT) Fall 2010 Conference in the United States entitled, “The Digital Native Language Learners are Here: How Do We Effectively Teach Language to the Digital Native?”

While disputed in academia, the term has become common parlance in the media as well as other areas of business where it is an easy handle for a potentially lucrative demographic trend. A Demos report from 2007, is emblematic of such claims:

The current generation of young people will reinvent the workplace, and the society they live in. They will do it along the progressive lines that are built into the technology they use everyday—of networks, collaboration, co-production and participation. The change in behavior has already happened. We have to get used to it, accept that the flow of knowledge moves both ways and do our best to make sure that no one is left behind.

(Green & Hannon, 2007, n.p.)

Moreover, a Gartner conference from a year later entitled, “The Attack of the Digital Natives,” captures the evangelistic mood, as well as the fact that the “new genera tion” is no longer spoken of in the future but rather the present tense:

Digital natives are working in your organization today. They are solving business problems, building social networks and creating new processes— with or without your help and support. They have new expectations about what information and technologies they should be able to access. They use defined processes in new ways, and invent new processes of their own. And they have a different expectation about how they want to work and play. Come visit with some of these digital natives and learn how to leverage their knowledge, enthusiasm and skills.

(Gartner, 2008, n.p.)

Bennett, Maton, & Kervin (2008; see Chapter 11, this volume) have rightly described the mood of such passages as increasingly akin to a form of “moral panic,” in which the differences between young people have been eradicated and they all appear to have been born with the same potentially transformative powers: digital natives are problem-solvers; they have new expectations; they invent new processes; they don't only work for an organization, they think of work as play; they are enthusiastic and skillful.

Derived from publications by Prensky (2001a, 2001b) and Tapscott (1998, 1999, 2009) and supported by a range of other popular appropriations of the term, then, the discourse of the digital natives in this simplified form can be considered as a type of technoevangelism, helping to make straight the roads of the global knowledge economy (Solomon & Schrum, 2007). This discourse takes a number of forms in different contexts but is popularly based on three main assumptions in which young people—those typically born after 1980—are said to:

1. constitute a largely homogenous generation and speak a different language vis-à-vis digital technologies, as opposed to their parents, the “Digital Immigrants”;
2. learn differently from preceding generations of students;
3. demand a new way of teaching and learning involving technology.

This book is an attempt to examine these arguments from a range of international and disciplinary perspectives and to understand both the temptations and dangers of technoevangelism, which often drive them, as well as the technoskepticism that may too easily dismiss them.

In adopting an international perspective the limitations of the generational argument are immediately apparent. While the Internet celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2010, it is only in the two last decades that larger numbers of the world's population have begun to use the World Wide Web, and only in the last five that the so-called “read/write web” has appeared. From a world population of almost 7 billion, however, approximately 2 billion have access to the Internet. While the percentage of people using the Internet in North America, Europe and Oceania/Australia lies between 58 percent and 77 percent, it is less than 35 percent for the populations of Africa (10.9 percent), Asia (21.5 percent), the Middle East (29.8 percent), and Latin America/Caribbean (34.5 percent) (Internet World Stats, 2010). To this international perspective we can also add a highly differentiated picture of access within nations. None of the contributors to this volume accept this undifferentiated “generational” viewpoint based on age alone.

The inclusion of the word “deconstruction” in the title of the volume provides an immediate clue as to one of its key aspects, then, in that I understand deconstruction to be a form of close reading in which the foundational assumptions of “naturalized” or “taken-for-granted” concepts are interrogated, thereby “dismantl[ing] the logic by which a particular system of thought … maintains its force” (Eagleton, 1983, p. 148; Thomas, 2006). As we turn to consider points two and three of the argument, deconstruction has an important resonance in the book in that a number of other potentially fascinating associations exist.

Both terms have been attacked as leading to damaging implications for education, the assumption being that they are concerned with the attempt to dismantle decades of tradition without having anything to replace it with. In the case of the discourse of digital natives, when viewed productively it derives from a deep suspicion of the way formal education has developed since the ind...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• 1 Technology, Education, and the Discourse of the Digital Native: Between Evangelists and Dissenters
• Part I Reflecting on the Myth
• Part II Perspectives
• Part III Beyond Digital Natives
• Notes on Contributors
• Index