First year students' experiences with technology: Are they really digital natives?

By Gregor E. Kennedy, Terry S. Judd, Anna Churchward, Kathleen Gray, Kerri-Lee D. Krause. 2008

1,256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports on a study conducted in 2006 with more than 2,000 incoming first-year Australian university students. Students were asked about their access to, use of and preferences for an array of established and emerging technologies and technology based tools. The results show that many first year students are highly tech-savvy. However, when one moves beyond entrenched technologies and tools (e.g. computers, mobile phones, email), the patterns of access and use of a range of other technologies show considerable variation. The findings are discussed in light of Prensky's (2001a) notions of the 'Digital Natives' and the implications for using technology to support teaching and learning in higher education.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11f10a1e857386d5a2d46617009c59aaaacc2a6b

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Citations in the corpus

Beyond natives and immigrants: exploring types of net generation students (2010, methodology): “Similar findings have been reported by Australian (Oliver & Goerke 2007; Kennedy et al. 2008, 2009) and UK (Jones et al. 2010) surveys of students' use of emerging technologies.”
Blended learning environments: Using social networking sites to enhance the first year experience (2010, background): “In an extensive study conducted in 2006 with more than 2,000 first-year Australian university students, Kennedy, found that while some students have embraced the technologies and tools of the 'net generation', it was by no means the universal student experience (Kennedy et al, 2008).”
Can we teach digital natives digital literacy? (2012, methodology): “Consistent with data shown elsewhere (e.g. Bennett & Maton, 2010; Jones, Ramanau, Cross, & Healing, 2010; Kennedy et al., 2008), these students do not engage as actively with content creation with Web 2.0 tools such as creating websites, keeping blogs or contributing to wikis.”
The impact of social media use on academic performance among university students: a pilot study (2013, background): “The findings of the study confirmed the earlier issues outlined by [14] according to their next generation research in three Australian Universities.”
STUDENTS ACCEPTANCE OF MOBILE LEARNING FOR HIGHER EDUCATION IN SAUDI ARABIA (2012, background): “Furthermore, findings from studies conducted by Whilst Kennedy et al. (2008a) and Kennedy et al. (2008b), mobile devices allowed users to conduct 9 activities in higher education as the following: a) to send pictures or movies to colleagues, b) to use mobile phone as MP3 player, c) to access informa”
Digital natives: where is the evidence? (2010, background): “educational policy makers and practitioners begin to change the educational system in the UK in response to these claims, we need more empirical evidence to inform the debate (Kennedy et al., 2008).”
Are digital natives a myth or reality? University students' use of digital technologies (2011, background): “Similar to Kennedy et al. (2008), Nagler and Ebner (2009) focused on types of technologies used and the extent rather than the nature of use.”