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What are the implications for how students should be taught etc?

The overwhelming question I've taken from the these readings is this – why should institutions adopt technology in delivering learning at all? Are they doing it because the curriculum is best served by technology, or simply because students are using technology? If it's the latter, caution is needed as these reports suggest that students may not always value it or even want it. Or are institutions taking it upon themselves to train students in using technology? If so, it needs to be asked if academic institutions are obliged to do this, and then if they are best placed to do it. (It might be better to get the students to do the teaching here!)

Interestingly, Salaway et al. suggest that the students with most facility with technology, students identified as early adopters, are students in engineering and related disciplines who regularly use discipline-related tools and software. Presumably, these tools are integrated with the students' professional training in authentic, vocational, real-world ways. Unless the discipline requires technology skills, it needs to be asked if such training is needed at all in most western countries, as the digital divide slowly closes.

I recently attended a meeting with a course team, and we discussed a proposed activity in which the student is asked to make an electronic image (of a collage) to upload to the web. Simple enough, you might have thought. But such was the teachers' (lack of) facility with the technology, the proposed activity has now spawned a subsidiary 'skills' activity for students who might require help in making and uploading an image. Now, I'm not saying that such support should not be available. Not for a moment. I mention it since it occurred to me then that the 'skills' activity was primarily for the teachers' benefit, and that it represents a record of the teachers' own learning achievement. It was a vivid glimpse into the academic digital divide, and how it, too, may be slowly closing.

What surprises me?

The first thing that surprised me in Salaway et al. was the statement that '[w]here students lead, institutions must follow' (p.5). Why? Students choose to come to campus, so you could argue that institutions do not have to use technology at all. Given this circumstance, if institutions choose to use technology, is the decision being determined by the curriculum first and foremost, or is it motivated by a perceived need to 'engage' students, or to seem contemporary and/or relevant? By following the students in the way Salaway et al. describe, institutions are not adopting technology for learning's sake or because learning requires or is enhanced by technology.

What also surprises me is the extent to which the Net Gen discourse perpetuates the digital academic divide between natives (students) and immigrants (teachers), a gap Prensky identified already in 2001. This gap is perhaps at its most apparent when students are identified with the technology, and characterised by their relationship and facility with the technology. As when Kennedy et al. describe 'the technology-based tools of a new generation of students' – tools institutions can use also, if they can figure out how to do so by first getting over their technology-induced inferiority complex.

It's as if, post-Prensky, academic commentators see technology as the proper domain of young learners, as their sole possession. It's interesting that students seem not to see technology in this way, but rather as 'part of life' (Salaway et al., 2008, p.9), something that is just 'out there'. It's interesting (and significant) that corporations and businesses do not see things this way, either. Does Vodafone or Tesco or Amazon or Ryanair regard technology as a domain or possession of young customers? I don't think so.

When will academic institutions get over this them-and-us, ethnographic approach to their view of technology? Perhaps only when their academic staff is made up in largest part by Net Genners?