Pedagogic Approaches to Using Technology for Learning - Literature Review
Boys typically send and receive 30 texts a day; girls typically send and receive 80 messages per day.
Teen texters aged 12-13 typically send and receive 20 texts a day.
14-17 year-old texters typically send and receive 60 text messages a day.
Older girls who text are the most active, with 14-17 year-old girls typically sending 100 or more messages a day or more than 3,000 texts a month.
However, while many teens are avid texters, a substantial minority are not. One-fifth of teen texters (22 per cent) send and receive just 1-10 texts a day or 30-300 a month.
2.3 Moral concerns and panics These and similar findings have led to concerns by educationalists and especially by the popular press. A whole number of different issues have been expressed including online safety, internet and games addiction, obesity, impoverished language use and declining standards of spelling and literacy. Research tends to disprove these fears - which have been dubbed ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 1972; Marwick, 2008). David Crystal, in an interview with the Guardian (Crace, 2008), stated that “Texting does not erode children’s ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves.” The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most text-isms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores. Another persistent and populist area of concern is around social networking sites and the digital identities of young people. Yet the Pew survey on Reputation, Management, and Social Media (Madden and Smith, 2010) found that young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults. 71 per cent of the 18-29s interviewed in August-September of 2009 who use social network sites reported having changed their privacy settings (vs. 55 per cent of those 50-64). Danah Boyd (2010) commented on the results: “Young adults are actively engaged in managing their reputation but they’re not always successful. The tools are confusing and companies continue to expose them without them understanding what’s happening. But the fact that they go out of their way to try to shape their information is important. It signals very clearly that young adults care deeply about information flow and reputation…” “Much of this is because of digital literacy – younger folks understand the controls better than the older folks AND they understand the implications better… This is also because, as always, youth are learning the hard way. As Pew notes, young adults have made mistakes that they regret. They’ve also seen their friends make mistakes that they regret. All of this leads to greater consciousness about these issues and a deeper level of engagement.” The suggestion from Boyd is that young people are learning from experience and not from education.
2.4 The digital natives debate A number of recent reports have pointed out that not all young people are so well versed and confident in the use of new technologies. The idea that society could be divided into two groups – ‘digital natives’ who grew up with digital technology from birth and ‘digital immigrants’ who were already socialized before digital technology arrived on the scene (Prensky, 2001) – is now largely discredited and Prensky himself now prefers to talk of ‘digital wisdom’. David White (2008) instead makes a distinction between digital residents and digital visitors. The resident is an individual who lives a percentage of their life online. The web supports the projection 9