Abstract:

The advent of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) puts in evidence how the importance of technologies in Didactics is still an open issue. A number of thinkers, such as Prensky, who introduced the concept of digital natives (2001), or Oblinger&Oblinger, who highlighted the importance of Internet in formal and informal learning processes (2005), showed how, nowadays, ICTs are part of the context and the use practices of young learners. However, such work has being accused of determinism, unjustified generalizations, US-ethnocentrism, and a medication-for-all-ills style in instructional design books (Schulmeister, 2008; Bennett et alii, 2008; Pedrò, 2006; www.netgenskeptic.com, 2008-10).

This paper presents L.o.D.E. (Learners of Digital Era), a model to systematize the review of the literature on the relation between learners and new media in the knowledge society. In the context of L.o.D.E., in 2009 we conducted “Learners’ voices”, a research carried out at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) and the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI). We investigated how learners, who belong to higher education institutes, use ICTs in their learning experience, both formal and informal, and how they perceive the eLearning.

Here below some of the main results
• Students at USI and SUPSI are familiar with ICTs, but not yet so much with “last generation” ones (Web 2.0 or social web): less than one third of them (30.9%) updates his/her profile on social networks every day; a rather small part of them has a personal website (20.7%) or a blog (27.9%). Generally speaking, internet is used very much as a tool for consulting and retrieving information, still little as a place where to publish contents.
• ICTs have become an integral part of learning practices at USI and SUPSI: 76.2% of respondents thinks that ICTs have improved a lot or fairly the way they learn.
• Respondents consider eLearning as an important and useful element in their learning practices (51.0%), but not as a fundamental one: more than half of the sample (60.7%) thinks to be able to learn also without eLearning.

Keywords:

Digital Natives, Generation Y, NetGeneration, Knowledge Society, Pedagogy & New Media, Didactic, eLearning.