Schools, culture and the digital era. A case for change?

Abstract

Each era is marked by that something particular that ultimately defines its generation. The recent but significant technological changes have been so profound that they branded both the rising generation as digital natives and ultimately also defined the preceding ones as well. Yet how further does this acknowledgement go? The solid presence of ICT related policies in education in various countries may be a recognition of hope and trust that many governments are placing in the intrinsic qualities of digital technologies in formal educational contexts. However, for students, when structured school contexts are compared to the parallel experienced realities of fast paced open learning scenarios that tailored bubbles of digitally mediated realities offer, they do not really coincide. The ways technology is being dictated and perceived within schools may potentially be a source of a conceptual misalignment and therefore alienation. Through a reflective perspective approach based on personal life experiences and the employment of an interpretational lens grounded within discourse of Capital (Bourdieu, 1996), Structuration (Giddens, 2004) and the Duality of Technology (Orlikowski, 1992), this paper portrays and focuses on the qualities that are significantly observable in the rising generation of students commonly labelled as the digital natives. Subsequently, a case that contextualises and solicits change within recursive dialogues of students’ popular culture and formal educational settings is discussed.