Shrinking Gen/IT gap; gender gap, and the need for balance between human interaction and IT-based learning: ECAR study

There’s a glut of articles and blog posts from 40-50 year olds about the “Net Gen,” “Digital Natives,” blah, blah, blah. Most of them are about how tech savvy teens and 20-somethings are.  While they largely are, so are a lot of other age groups. Like many other research studies, the gen/IT gap is significantly smaller today than many of those articles claim. Here’s one such study, from Educause.

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology includes a literature review, surveys, student focus groups, student comment (open ended), and a comparison of longitudinal data from 2006-2009 surveys.

Addressing age and tech use:

“Whereas 18- and 19-yr-old respondents from the 39 institutions that participated in each of the last four years’ studies reported a consistently high use of SNSs, use by those ages 30-39 more than tripled (a 236% increase), and among respondents 40 and older, SNS use more than quadrupled (a 326% increase).”

Addressing educational use (all students):

Despite the very high percentages of personal use of SNSs, only about 27.8% reporting using them in a course during the quarter or semester of the survey. About a quarter use wikis, fewer than 2 in 10 use IM, and blogs 11%.

It doesn’t seem we’ll be getting a flood of new graduates into the workforce who are totally savvy with Web 2.0 tools for workplace education.

How students view their own technology adoption and IT skills shows an interesting gender gap. While half of all students (51%) identify themselves as mainstream adopters, more than half of males (53.8%) claimed they are early adopters or innovators, whereas only one-fourth of females (25.4%) did so.

On learning experience preference:

Despite the large proportion of our respondents who belong to the Net Generation and have grown up digital, respondents indicate they still appreciate the face-to-face learning experience. 59.6% refer moderate T in their courses and fewer than 6% preferring extremes – either no IT (2%) or exclusive IT (3.5%).

There’s other interesting data including mobile learning (a focus of the study)….the giant sleeper. (JC)

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology 2009 | Shannon D. Smith, Gail Salaway, Judith Borreson Caruso

Tagged as: educause, netgen