The Digital Student: or the impact that new media technologies are having on young people

I'm grateful to Andrew Clay who lectures on "Studies in Digital Technology" in our Faculty of Technology for this list of resources about the impact that new media technologies are having on young people, including today's Guardian supplement. I've added a few things I like to each resource in the list.

1. Digital Student - a supplement printed in today's Guardian newspaper and available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/digitalstudent.

• Almost every article is written by non-students. Do the experiences of new technologies that are described ring true with what our students and tutors are doing, I wonder? A key quote comes in the podcast article: 'iTunes U could "question the role of the lecturer" because unless someone sets the information in context, learners won't get much benefit from it.' There is very little discussion of progressive pedagogies in the supplement - after all this time we are still fixated on the tools and traditional power relationships. But then maybe this supplement is about opening up a discussion.
• I love this quote from Lawrie Phipps from the JISC about the value of Second Life: " The nice thing about Second Life is that the tangible benefits are whatever you need them to be." This reflects the fact that tangible benefits of e-learning and technology are so often difficult to nail down, but also that progressive pedagogies for virtual worlds still haven't taken off. Will they ever mainstream? Especially given the view from one of our design tutors that: "Five of my final year students are working on a business internship building assets and environments... suffice to say it looks generations better than Second Life". Plus we are seeing more-and-more bespoke business/corporate worlds being developed.

2. The Digital Youth Project's report on how young people are using new media at http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf

• I love the trichotomy of participation framed by "Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out". Educators who are serious about engaging progressive pedagogy with play should read this in-light of the EYFS.
• I created a wordle image for the white paper. I like the fact that it highlights: new: youth; media; learning; participation; messing; and around; as big tags.
• The implications for education are critical: Social and recreational new media use as a site of learning; Recognizing important distinctions in youth culture and literacy; Capitalizing on peer-based learning; and New role for education?

3. The CarPhone Warehouse's Mobile Life Project 2008 report 'Exploring our relationships with modern technology in a wireless world'.

• Interesting to review this in light of the NSPCC's Children and the internet [Internet Safety] briefing, on access for young people and their structured participation.

Symposium Keynote 1: Learner-expectations, technology and formal/informal learning

Expectations are not always what they seem, and the answers we elicit from learners when we ask them about their expectations, at both undergraduate and post graduate level, need to be more critically examined. Technology plays a big part in all our daily lives, learners may expect one thing, need another and when asked the question may tell you what they think the right answer is! Furthermore, we need to understand how and when learning is occurring, and the part that technology is playing in the process.

Lawrie Phipps' keynote at our symposium on Friday will draw upon conversations with Dave Cormier and his ideas on rhizomatic learning, George Siemens’ theory, connectivism and recent work through the JISC Users and Innovation programme. The presentation will ask the delegates to consider the emergent technologies characterised by web 2.0 through two different perspectives.

• The technologies are disrupting to the students’ learning and staff time, they pick up information that we haven’t given them off the internet, and the technology is everywhere like an omnipresent technodeity
• The technologies are providing new ways of engaging in discourse between peers, offering new opportunities to find knowledge and exercise creativity and the sheer breadth of the technology creates something that most people can engage with at some level

Understanding the experiences of learners in a digital age: ELESIG start-up

I think I struggle with the whole learners' experiences thing, and I think that's because I feel like a grandma who has just been handed a basketful of free range, extra large, shelled, hard-boiled eggs by her smiling, fresh-faced grandson who has just discovered the best way to eat them... I'm not saying that we don't need to identify where our learners come from, their motivations and aspirations, the types of tools that they use and why, and how technologies impact upon their learning and achievement, and more importantly, their sense of who they are and how they can act in the world. However, I wonder whether that which is being presented as shiny and new hasn't already got a long track record. Perhaps sector-wide maturity in e-learning, and pedagogic evaluation, has reached the point where we can discuss the normalisation of this process.

So what were the lessons learned from last week's ELESIG event?

1. Upskilling staff to be both reactive and proactive in their use of technologies is central to connecting students' uses of technologies to the development of their critical literacies.
2. Higher education needs to stop chasing "cool". There are core academic values that we want to develop, and it may be that some institutions build a digital reputation that connects into those core academic values and provides a framework within which students can define themselves and succeed. However, institutions are unlikely to stay ahead of the technological game, given that students are so fleet of foot and universities are so unwieldy.
3. Helen Beetham made the point that evidence from learners defined some clear challenges for institutional values and cultures. She posited that a crunch point may be coming, where academic issues, for instance, around the centrality of subject knowledge or plagiarism clashed with 21st century learning that is predicated upon building social capital, by way of mashing, reusing and re-presenting the work of others.
4. There is a growing theme around the creation of on demand, personal learning environments, in which the individual learners experiences (rather than institutional e-Learning drivers) enable the aggregation of relevant tools. Connected to this, Oxford Brookes University, highlighted that they are embedding the notion of the digitally literate learner in their new institutional e-Learning Strategy and also within validations. Through our e-Learning Champions and programme development checklists at validation and periodic review, we engage with these issues. However, I wonder whether DMU needs to have a more overtly didactic, Brookesian approach that forces the issue of engaging with digitally literate learners, rather than expecting that staff will engage with the issue.
5. As ever, there was only tentative engagement with the learner's role in society and the institutional contribution to that. The central theme seemed to be what the learner values in higher education, and whether we can help learners achieve some resilience in managing their learning. However, Mel from South Bank argued against the "destructive effect of transmission learning" and highlighted that we still see so much of that through the use of our institutional VLEs. It was also interesting to pick up the throwaway remark from one of the presenters about adding value to "the technologies that are provided for them (students)". For me, there are several untapped areas.

• I am with those who argue that higher education is a democratic project, and that (it into the work of Ronald Barnett) it can be made socially empowering through a learner's coming to understand their subject area, themselves and their world, and coming to act in it. This social empowerment, and the cultural and social capital which follows, needs more understanding.
• I am less interested in community, and more in participation and association. How do individuals associate or disassociate, become enfranchised or disenfranchised, participate or step away, and why? What therefore is the impact of PLEs on learner engagement, motivation and achievement, both in higher education and society?
• In terms of transition, progression and retention, how do technologies and the ways in which academics engaged with them, connect into student's emotional development? What is the impact upon digital natives, digital immigrants, employer engagement, mature students, etc?