Had another chat about the ‘net generation’ today and there seems to be some research out there (JISC?) stating that being a ‘digital native’ depends less on one’s age but rather on other factors. Makes sense – I’m not 18 (or whatever age the ‘net generation’ is to be) and I can identify with ‘them’ (i.e. surf the internet while watching telly, which is in itself boring anyway!).

A colleague of mine has put up a reference to this article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/035e83fe-6f18-11de-9109-00144feabdc0.html, which is about a 15 year old writing about his media usage habits. In my view, this article ‘overhypes’ all this a bit. Yes, today’s 15 year olds will be tomorrow’s consumers but that doesn’t mean that for example universities should avoid having students do some literature review because that may involve a lot of text! A literature review can be used to assess/reflect/etc on existing sources and hopefully may encourage students to not just un-critically accept anything that the web/google/a published piece of text presents them with. ..