engleski

Digital native’s (in)formal learning environment

Digital natives or so called millennial, net generation (net gen) or generation Y are some of the synonyms that refer to those born since 1982 (Ralph, Olsen, 2007.). The current literature accentuates that only approximately 1/6 of the world has access to digital technologies and the lack of digital literacy causes the digital divide so if we want to be precise we can not talk about digital natives as a generation but rather a population. (Palfrey, Gasser, 2009) However, digital natives form their own world-‘cyberspace’ and have their own culture and language. Some of the main characteristics of the digital natives are that they: possess sophisticated skills with ICT ( information and communication technologies) and have particular learning preferences or styles ; (Bennett, Maton, Kervin, 2008) develop their own social norms around digital culture and highly value creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship ; (Palfrey, Gasser, 2009) like to parallel process and multi-task, prefer random access (like hypertext), function best when networked, thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards and prefer games to “serious” work ; (Prensky, 2001) Regarding this last characteristics of digital natives it should be mentioned that gaming is recognized as a literacy activity. (Bolan, Canada, Cullin, 2007) Digital natives use social software tools frequently not just for entertainment but also in educational purpose and customize their (in) formal learning environment according to their above mentioned preferences. As the digital libraries play an important role in digital natives (in) formal learning environment and some studies (Secker, Price, 2007) conducted before have shown that social software tools can improve access to library resources, develop information literacy and collaboration among users or stuff it would be interesting to find out which of these tools are the most popular among digital natives at the moment and should be incorporated in digital libraries. That’s why we surveyed the sample of 102 digital natives in Osjecko baranjska county about their use of social software tools. The results of the survey of digital natives and conclusions how these findings can help us to shape better digital libraries are presented.

digital natives; informal education; social software

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