Main thought:
How to make empirical evidence of young people's interactive media use available to teachers?.
A growing number of studies provides empirical data that 'debunks' the existence of a Netgeneration. Chris Jones (Reader in the Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK) created an international network of researchers working on this type of research. Jones organized with this network a symposium at the
Networked Learning Conference 2010 (proceedings freely available). He als edited a special section in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. And another special section will be published soon in Learning, Media & Technology. I contributed to both the NLC symposium and the LMT special section.
The JCAL special section has been discussed on twitter and blogs. @smartinez
on her blog added important comments to the availability of the research papers:
The Journal has some fabulous looking articles – but I can’t read them. Most of you can’t read them either. It’s a closed journal. Sorry, only for academics and researchers. Here’s the problem. The “digital native” myth is being perpetuated in popular culture, books, and keynote speeches, all easily accessible. These rebuttals, well-researched (I assume), peer-reviewed, and not sensationalized, are locked behind closed doors.
So when teachers hear that the curriculum is being modified to meet the needs of “digital natives” – what can they do? When educators present at conferences about this issue, should they cite the abstract to refute the silly (but free) sloganeering? When they talk to friends, neighbors, teachers, or the school board who think that kids “brains are different now” can they pull from a deep knowledge of brand new, relevant research? No – it’s not available
I agree, the papers should be publicly available for free. At the same time, I published my research in closed journals as well. This shows the dilemma for researchers which recently caused discussion on twitter and blogs.
However, I am not convinced that open access solves the problems: I know a lot of teachers who are interested in my results, but who can not find their way to journals, open access or not.
So the main question for me is: How can we bring our results to them, apart from emailing a paper to teachers in our network (which according to journal publishers is illegal...)?
I tried to solve this problem in the last few years by giving presentations at schools and publishing a report, available for free via Dutch institute Kennisnet. But something tells me there should be better ways...
