Jen Millea @ education.au

The latest issue of the Journal of Online Education provides a couple of useful articles summarising some of the key issues related to 21st century teaching and learning and introduced me to the concept of adaptational neuroplasty - which seems to suggest that a lifetime of interaction with new technologies is changing the biology of how we go about thinking.

However, I think there’s a lack of interrogation of some ideas that have gained currency - for example, the Prensky concept of digital natives is one that I believe is flawed but is taken as reality in one of the papers.

I mentioned some Australian research by academics from Griffith University and the University of Melbourne in a previous post which challenges the digital native assumption.

Further, there is still a digital divide, and there are also philosophies of education that do not preference digital learning or the use of ICT and in fact discourage it in the early years of learning.

This means that we are not going to have a generation of digital natives and that we will be dealing with students with varied experiences in the use of ICT. As we dive into the digital education revolution, we need to keep these complexities in mind.