A Digital of What?

Social Media and Academia

In this post on social media’s slow slog into the ivory towers of academia:

“we assumed these kids already know, and we don’t teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don’t. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?”

Assumptions, assumptions after assumptions, that is why I think we need to question those assumptions behind, especially when we have little ideas about the background knowledge, skills and experience of the kids.

Digital Natives and Digital Migrants

It seems unhelpful to mark and distinguish the students/learners basing upon the labelling of digital “natives” from digital “migrants”.

How about the users’ behaviour? This report  published by JISC on the digital information seekers provides a comprehensive account on users’ behavior.   Refer also to this Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies  on the use of library facilities, resources and technologies.

Visitors and Residents

Another way of looking into users’ behavior is based on Visitors and Residents, as shared by David White.  See this post on Visitors and Residents for further details.

Downside of Social Media

What are the downside of social media based on an information over-abundance?  This post may strike a chord for many people who found information abundance an issue. There are concerns on the impact of internet on our attention and cognition.

 Nicolas Carr’s influential article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for the Atlantic suggested the Internet was sapping our attention and stunting our reasoning.

How about the use of digital resources by students and staff?

In this Disappearing of digital resources:

“It wasn’t surprising to find that students were Googling for anything they could get their hands on but the extent to which academics are doing this as well was unexpected. The difference between the groups was that staff have the expertise required to critically evaluate what they find while the students are nervous about waiting-time using resources which might prove to be off-topic.”

So a digital of what?  Residents and Visitors, and a blend of them.

Postscript: An excellent paper on Visitors and Residents.

An interesting post here relating to Digital Native

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