Mark Bullen

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Mark Bullen commented on The Net Generation: Myths, Realities and Implications for Higher Education Okay, I took another look at the John Seely-Brown article, Growing Up Digital. It is a thoughtful piece that describes the social dimension of learning and how the Internet can help create a new learning ecology that brings together explict and tacit knowledge and allows learners to become immersed in a community of practice. At the beginning of the article, however, he makes a number of claims about how today’s youth learn. It’s the typical net gen stuff: they multiprocess and they do it well, they have digital literacy, the ability to read not just text but image and multimedia, they learn by doing, they are "bricoleurs". He doesn’t explain this concept very clearly but I think he means the ability to build meaning and understanding by making connections between ideas through discovery. None of these claims are supported by evidence which is not problem. This isn’t a research article. The problem is, Seely-Brown’s claims about today’s youth are cited by other Net Gen writers (Obllinger 2005; Hartman et al., 2005) to support their dubious claims. And this is one of my main critiques: educators need to be much more careful about the evidence they use to support their claims. Just because somebody wrote it doesn’t make it true. 7 months ago
Mark Bullen commented on The Net Generation: Myths, Realities and Implications for Higher Education Thanks Frances and thanks to guest765bd. I certainly agree that anecdotal data is useful and I am not suggesting we ignore it. The problem I see though is that the "research" on this issue tends to use anecdotal observations to confirm preconceptions. If the anecodotal data were collected as part of a well-designed study we could have some confidence about its value. As it is, because much of the research is proprietary we don’t have these details and the research that does provide details doesn’t inspire much confidence. I take your point about a defining set of issues but the problem with people like Tapscott is they don’t stop at that. They generalize to the entire generation and make radical recommendations based on those defining issues. I’ll have to take another look at the John Seely Brown article. Thanks again for your comments. Mark. 8 months ago