Digital Natives and Educational Traditions. What Changes When Exchanging Textbook Content with Internet Search?

Abstract

Use of technology challenge traditional concepts of learning in school. But what is actually changing? The paper shows result from a study that finds that the shift from textbook to internet content implicates significant changes. Textbooks present qualified content that is well adapted to the cognitive development of students of certain ages. Using internet content gives no such guarantees. The content validation has to be taken care of by the students. The internet search demands more complex skills than accessing content through the textbook. The students have to find relevant search terms, review and validate the results they find, select relevant content, use relevant strategies for storing and retrieving content and having the ability to present abstracts of their findings that are adapted to their learning purpose.

Collaboration works well for searching for content online because the students can benefit from each other’s prior knowledge when discussing and reflecting during the learning work. Communicative and collaborative skills are important. So are good relations, to able students to work through obstacles and keep focus on the task even when internet searching takes them everywhere. Internet content has a flexibility that makes it easy adaptable to all students’ learning prerequisites. Student collaboration between heterogeneous peers can work well because the complexity of the task involves a lot of different tasks to manage and are easy to distribute. It also makes possible for high performing students to find engaging content that will motivate and nourish the learning motivation.