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It is  been some time that I am reading and thinking about the newly coined word "digital natives" as opposed to  "digital immigrants".The first is used to refer to the generation born after 1980 (at leats in the West) and the second to refer to the generation before that. It is very easy to get lost in the mostly rhetoric policy documents. This usually masks the vary nature of differences these two generations have in terms of how they learn and what schools need to do.

Recently I got my hands on a good article (Bennet, Maton & Kervin 2008, The Digital Natives debate: A Critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology) which raises fundamental questios about the debate and states that: there are two reasons that proponents of this difference usually put forward:

1) the new generation"s immersion in a technology-rich culture which has influenced their skills and interests

2) this has changed the way they learn:they held to be be active expriential learners, proficient in multi-tasking and multi-processing, prefer game-based learning and discovery-based learning where they can explore and test ideas etc

Based on these assumptions they claim that school education should radically change the way education is now taking place because it is didactic, teacher centred etc

Evaluation of evidence from the field shows that:

1) still technology skills and expereinces are far from universal (only a few high SES children got it) and the things they do with new technologies are more seeking info and communicating them rather than making meaning, ideas, criticaly analysing etc

2) the claimed difference in learning styles and prefernces arenot supported by evidence: multi-tasking is not new (e.g. we did that when doing hoemwork in front of TV) and multi-tasking is not always a good thing as cognitive psychologists state that it may cause loss of concentration and also leads to cognitive overload for brain. Moreover, generalisation about the learning styles of all digital natives is not correct because there are lots of variation within and between groups like age groups, gender ets. Finally interactivity which is present in games and in fact harnesses high levels of engagement and motivation is not easy to put into practice in schools i.e. designing such games that foster deep learning and also cater for the gender gap is not easy.

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