Are today's students truly 'tech savvy'?
Summary: A new report released by the ESRC puts doubt in the theory.
It is difficult to prove that the Generation Y and young people today are not more technologically adapted than their older counterparts.
They may sometimes display an unhealthy level of dependence on their mobile phone, become bored easily when taught in school how to use basic commands in Microsoft Word and be called upon often to fix the problem with the printer, but are all members of this age bracket clued-up and comfortable with technology?
A new study conducted by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) explored this question in an attempt to find out just how the younger generation connect and use technology.
Among other findings, the council discovered that there is a minority of students who choose not to use email and are confused by the range of technology used and available at universities. However, many students demonstrated heavy dependence on their mobile phones, and often find themselves distracted by social media during study.
The research was led by Dr Christopher Jones of the Open University, a global course provider, and is named "The Net Generation encountering elearning at University". The team interviewed and collated data from over 2000 students in their first year at five British universities. Dr Jones said:
"Our research shows that the argument that there is a generational break between today's generation of young people who are immersed in new technologies and older generations who are less familiar with technology is flawed.
The diverse ways that young people use technology today shows the argument is too simplistic and that a new single generation, often called the 'net generation', with high skill levels in technology does not exist."
The study found:
- 97.8 percent of students owned a mobile phone;
- Just over three quarters -- 77.4 percent -- owned a laptop and 38.1 percent owned a desktop computer.
- 70.1 percent felt their access to computers was sufficient to meet their computing needs.
- The mobile phone was chosen by 83.2 percent as the device students would miss the most if it was taken away.
- A small minority of students don't use email or have access to mobile phones.
Students 20 years old or younger reported being more engaged in instant messaging, texting, social networks and downloading video media than students who were aged 25 years or more. Only 4.3 percent of those 20 or younger never used social networking sites, and for those 35 or older this rose to 78.5 percent.
Younger students were more likely to use these services for information and communication, whereas the older age bracket claimed to use them for study purposes. Social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter were commonly referenced as distracting, but students said they sometimes turned them off or 'took breaks' when studying.
Certain technologies used by universities were used by students rarely, no matter the age; contributing to blogs -- only 21.5 per cent -- and wikis -- 12.1 per cent -- and just 2 percent stated they had used a virtual world, outside of gaming.
Despite the rapid development and increased adoption of mobile technology, students still inhabit the same 'learning spaces' that other generations relied upon. They continue to study in their bedrooms, university libraries and study spaces, and few choose to use mobile technology more than occasionally to study in other areas, such as coffee shops.
According to the research, there was little evidence that today's students demand modern technology when entering university that the academic institution cannot provide. Technological integration is expanding, however in terms of study, students may not be as reliant on it to learn as we stereotype them to be.
Image credit: Bartosz Maciejewski
Related:
- TeenTech Weekly: Facebook 'friending' students, virtual school, the Gen-Y workplace
- Fairfax high school considers going virtual
- Students file-sharing work on Facebook: Is it legal?
- The pros and cons of social media classrooms
- Students, spectrum and the rise of mobile tech
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Talkback
Users!=techies
Complete agreement
A techie isn't someone who surfs on their smartphone or sits in front of a game console for hours at a time. A techie is the one who knows how to fix (or at least troubleshoot) the smartphone/game console/other tech toy, if not assemble one from components.
Provided 'using' doesn't mean programming.
That was part of my point
There's less TO use
*sigh* The days where magazines devoted to computers had programs one could type in, save, and augment... but, as people say, "the 80s sucked" - I bet none of them had any intellectual skills... but who needs those when it's easier, fun, and more profitable, to bamboozle people with psychological manipulation...
Man, now I feel old
Technology relatively new to mass consciousness
Smartphones had been around for a while before a critical simplification (abandoning the live info with it manual placement for just a sea of icons) allowed them to be OK with the mass population.
Use of technology does not equate with understanding. I suspect that what you are witnessing is that 20 years ago, technology was less prevalent and those using it tended to know a lot about it (though there were many salespeople willing to put their feet in their mouths). Now with technology so prevalent, and the actual raw % of the total population that are capable of understanding it possibly not much greater than then, the average technical understanding of users of the technology has decreased over that period.
Probably most technology users are less innovative with it than some animals.
Assumption of skill
Ouch. In my mind sometimes more dangerous than someone who knows they have no clue.
too true
It's a generation or two (Gen Y and the Dot Commers) that fall into that category. Granted there are exceptions, but we're obviously not talking about youngsters that are either brought up immersed in I.T. (via parents with a background), studying I.T or that already have some qualification and requisite competency in an area of I.T.
high school students
They for the most part are terrible problem solvers when it comes to tech.
changing printers in the programs they use is beyond most of these kids.
While they take word, excel, powerpoint classes in middle school, they can't do any real formatting in word besides center, bold, italic and font changes.
forget about excel and powerpoint presentations they do are extremely rudimentary.
Lets hope when they finally grow up, these kids don't support the computers that run any critical systems otherwise put your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye.
just my observation
I agree wholeheartedly.
Being that computing devices are such powerful-- and vulnerable-- tools, if people really want to be safe using them they shouldn't avoid understanding how it works. Yet, they carry around in their pockets/backpacks tools that are hundreds of times more powerful then the computers that got astronauts to the moon and wonder why they got a virus.
And we just basically scrapped the space program...
Modern tech companies foster a 'replace with better looking' mentality
And the mass consciousness seems to worship those who have encouraged us to be merely consumers of technology. However, those that we remember long after they are dead are not those who gave us what we desired, but those who dared to challenge us to be better and take responsibility for ourselves.
Clueless
At least in the "olden" days you could find competent office workers who knew how to compose a letter and be a "competent" secretary. Now, not only do very few people know how to use Word and Excel, they also lack all the other office skills that were previously taught.
I must be an old codger, but mostly I see kids wandering around talking or texting and oblivious to the world around them.
All thumbs
Typing skills? Almost non-existent.
Typing skills
At about 14/15 they rightly drop IT as a separate subject altogether. Admittedly the school is an independent one but I am not sure the state schools here in the UK are that different.
Now aged 15 he still touch-types at high speed.
Unfortunately it's probably not standard
However, in my senior year in high school, since I'd already taken all of the available computer programming courses, & couldn't take any more study halls, I took the Personal Typing class. We actually had IBM typewriters -- not the ones with built-in correction ribbon, but the ones where you had to hold the plastic correction tab between the keys & paper if you wanted to "white over" a mistake. The thing is, even a few decades later, I can still touch-type over half of the time, & still type over 80 words/minute...not to mention being able to hit 13,000 keystrokes/minute for alphanumeric data entry. Some of that's from using computers for all these years, but the majority is from that typing class.
Me too
It's a joke!
Couldn't agree more