Immersed into digital world: Learning and students’ perception
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Problem Statement: Computer literacy is one of the basic training requirements of modern generation. Due to the diverse groups of ICT users we can expect conflicts and misunderstanding between two basic groups - the so-called digital immigrants and digital natives (Prensky, 2001). We are able to describe many situations in work groups arising, for example, when the group of digital natives is managed by a maladjusted digital immigrant (pupils and an elder teacher) or when the group of digital immigrants is managed by a digital native (adult students in further learning and an young teacher). Purpose of Study: In our study we try to find some ways that can help to reduce the differences between groups, digital immigrants and digital natives. Research Methods: Our study is based on the concrete ICT activities linked to daily life. We validate the presented procedures on two groups of students who studied the same university course: one was aged 20-25 years (full-time mode), the other 35-45 years (combined mode). Findings: It appears that, the Internet search engines can serve as the unifying tool for both groups. As a common platform we used Google.com in our university course preparing the teachers of Vocational training. Generally speaking, digital natives work better with digital technologies, more often and faster than digital immigrants. Sometimes digital immigrants don’t understand the development of digital technologies in general. Often the digital natives are not able to explain how to handle with ICT based things. On the other hand the elder students use experience from the real life and can evaluate the information proposed by the virtual world better. Conclusions: The paper shows the ways how to change the traditional approaches when ICT supported teaching is applied. However these changes must be done bottle on the teacher’s and on the students’ side, depending on their digital nationality. From the current response of students, we assume that the proposed learning based on the concrete ICT activities linked to daily life lead to better understanding of the learning aim. |