One of the most important things about ICT use is likely to be the decision not to use ICT. I have stumbeled upon some interesting reading about this over the summer and this would be a handy place to annotate some notes about it:
Seb Schmoller http://fm.schmoller.net/ often posts interesting things and I appreciate that they come to my email not to often. A recent post of his noted some reseacrh at the college level that went a bit against the grain about the net generation. This included the term ‘effortful’ an ugly word but a useful one (perhaps because of it’s ugliness?) to note that we can’t just expect tech use to appear miraculously. http://fm.schmoller.net/2009/06/effortful-educating-the-ne-t-generation-a-handbook-of-findings-for-practice-and-policy.html
From this I think the summary is worth quoting. I wonder if this applies equally to MHS
1. The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported.
2. There is great diversity in students’ and staff experiences with technology, and their preferences for the use of technology in higher education.
3. Emerging technologies afford a range of learning activities that can improve student learning processes, outcomes, and assessment practices.
4. Managing and aligning pedagogical, technical and administrative issues is a necessary condition of success when using emerging technologies for learning.
5. Innovation with learning technologies typically requires the development of new learning and teaching and technology-based skills, which is effortful for both students and staff.
6. The use of emerging technologies for learning and teaching can challenge current university policies in learning and teaching and IT.
From this we can get to a lot of interesting other places:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/08/20/some_thoughts_o_1.html
(“Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations.”)
A neat idea is taking the Snark Syndrome and applying it here:
http://www.netgenskeptic.com/2009/07/snark-syndrome-and-net-gen-discourse.html
Which artichoke linked to her post
More than enough links for now.
My summary is: There is more variation in aptitude and adoption within a group than between groups, so the net-gen doesn’t really exist. It is, however, a popular notion (snarky) so we need to be extremely critically aware of it. The effect of ICT on social norms and development is unpredictable. Can we take people down a path if we don’t know where it leads? Maybe a risk assessment would be a good vehicle for discussing this.
Moving Forward 