Digital Natives? A Reflection upon Teachers' Representations of Young Students as Expert Users of New Technologies. Analysis of an Experience Integrating ICT into School.

Abstract

The analysis of a task including ICT within a specific teaching-learning activity helped understand the perceptions and actions of a group of youths at secondary school, as well as the underlying assumptions of their teachers at the time of designing and monitoring such a task. Based on a number of interviews with student and teacher-participants, we carry out a critical revision of some conceptual categories used today to describe the relationship between youths and new technologies, more specifically the concept known as digital natives. Thus, it is proposed that we need to become aware of the extent to which these categories influence teaching practices and lead us design learning tasks which are hard to accomplish given that it is assumed learners possess competences or abilities they actually lack.