chatting with ‘digital natives’

Yesterday I took the opportunity to chat to four digital natives of differing ages at my home. They were Anna (school), Patrick final year university), Yvette (university student) and Carl (last year at school). Anna (17) multi-tasks regularly: listening to music, texting or mailing, doing homework etc and finds it normal and unproblematic. Carl (18) definitely prefers to do one thing at a time so that his concentration is fully on what he is doing. Patrick and Yvette both say multi-tasking is fine and normal when all of the activities are revision or routine. When they want to learn something new they need quiet (with maybe instrumental music but not singing). They may even leave home and go somewhere to concentrate because there are too many distractions at home.

There we have it: four natives of different ages covering the whole spectrum of techniques – very unscientific fact-finding but the whole appeared to me to have more to do with personality types than being ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’.