Friday, January 14, 2011

Separating Fact from Fiction in the Digital Generation Discourse

I will be making an online presentation on our digital learners research to Institute of Technology Silgo, in Ireland on January 19 at 4:10 pm GMT (8:10 am PST). You can find out more about the presentation and how to register at:
Separating Fact from Fiction in the Digital Generation Discourse

2 comments:

Dennis said...

So what would have made Tapscott's research unbiased? In other words, what could he have done to make his studies valid and reliable? Would including non-internet users have done it?

Mark Bullen said...

Dennis:

If you want to generalize from a sample, the sample should be representative of the population you are generalizing to. So if you only collect data from people who are already engaged with the technology, you are not likely to get a representative picture of how people in that group are using technology.

It's part of a larger problem with the broader educational technology discourse in my view. Educational technologists sometimes forget there are a lot of people who aren't immersed in the technology and aren't using it in their daily work. There is a bit of an echo chamber effect in which educational technologists talk to other educational technologists to test ideas.