The Digital Turn in Higher Education: A “Digital Natives” Mythbusting
Journal Title: International Journal of Research in English Education - Year 2019, Vol 4, Issue 1
Abstract
Digital technology has recently become a ubiquitous feature of the modern era posing problems to higher education institutions. Digitization of the academic life has brought forth the claims that there is an evident disparity between the digital naturals and digital immigrants and that the myth of the former is “undemystifiable”. The claim that the new digitized generation has its own distinguished learning preferences, skills of learning and beliefs about how learning in such an era should make higher education authorities revisit their curricula and “reshuffle the academic cards” so that the digital immigrants could catch up with the fast-running pace of the digitized train and provide the digital natives with what they need for a successful academic life. The overall aim of the present work therefore is to investigate the extent to which the so-called digital natives really have control of the use of educational technology either as part of their self-directed learning practices or as part of a formal tertiary level teaching, the type of technologies they prefer to use, whether they possess the required digital skills that are important for their future careers, and how vital the digital skills are in boosting their employability. In line with the major findings of the present study, it could be concluded that the media change under the created discourse of “moral panic” has unveiled the singularity of this generation and has forced academic authorities to reconsider learning, teaching as well as both skills and employability of a such a generation for the betterment of a healthy academic higher education system.
Authors and Affiliations
Bani Koumachi
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP536821
- DOI 10.29252/ijree.4.1.69
- Views 88
- Downloads 0
Cultivating Responses from Students through Literature Circle
The English literature component has been around in the Malaysian Education system since 2000. However, literature as a subject has always been learned more for transactional purposes rather than for its aesthetic value....
Contributory Role of Praise in Improving Collocational Knowledge of University Students Majoring in TEFL and Linguistics
The power of praise in changing student behavior is that it both indicates teacher approval and informs the student about how the praised academic performance or behavior conforms to teacher expectations. Notably, praise...
A Study of English Listening Comprehension Improvement via Product- vs. Process-Oriented Tactics: The Case Study of Shiraz EFL Learners
As listening comprehension plays an indispensable role in language learning, the way in which language instructors cover teaching listening comprehension has been controversial; the recent study selected two approaches t...
Exploring Interactive and Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Discussion Sections of Social and Medical Science Articles
Metadiscourse markers are used as one of the tools which make writing more effective in social environment and are regarded as one of the most important features in communication among people for expressing the informati...
The Effect of Electronic Portfolio Assessment on the Writing Performance of Iranian EFL Learners
The present study attempted to investigate the impact of electronic portfolio assessment on performance of Iranian EFL learners’ writing. To do so, 30 advanced EFL learners who participated in a TOEFL preparation course...