How+do+these+students+differ?

Are You Listening?
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The above is an example on how a student is immersed with technology and that they do learn differently and they need changes to be made in education to cope with their learning styles and environment. A lot of their day after school is spent using a form of media be it the computer, cellphone or television. The computer which is the medium for the internet is the main source where students will gather and retrieve information. It is also the place where social networking occurs. This is the very fact that goes beyond the teacher for a teacher only knows a limited amount of information on a subject where as the internet has a plethora of it. They have the time to look at different points of view and opinions on the any topic they so desire. They don't go to libraries as often as older generations have for they have the comfort of being at home and having access to articles, books, magazines online.

These students/youth use online media to extend friendships (social networks) and interests. They can always be "on" and have access or contact someone right away if need be from their cellphone or other product such as an I Touch. Their way of processing information is also slightly different and they tend to skim through a lot of information rather than reading the whole article. Through the use of online media, youth engage in peer-based and self-directed learning. The can create blogs, wikis, pod-casts, etc, in order to collaborate information with one another. Instead of meeting together as a group and trying to find a time in a day to meet, they can collaborate on their own time when to contribute and look at others' work/input.

Yet no all information is quality information and this is one of the limitations of research on the web, They have such an abundant amount of information that can come from anyone that it can be very difficult to find good resources and quality information. That is why students have an idea what plagiarism is but they do it sometimes because they can't find any other good sources so they use only the one or two resources that they find. Since everyone has access to the internet, they can put their own input or be a publisher. Yet this information can be outdated, false, and inconsistent. This makes is difficult for digital natives to research and to build skills in order to find quality information on the web.

[[image:http://francisanderson.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/teens_online.jpg width="320" height="203"]]
Here are the main points when anyone especially students research for anything:
 * 1) Revisiting the same sites frequently.
 * 2) Abundant amount of information e.g. Having too many sites to go to.
 * 3) The inability to replicate searches reliably each time you visit different sites. E.g. different search engines, inconsistency
 * 4) Too many unsuitable search results (i.e. poor filtering) Example of this is by the 10 page of the search on Google, usually no sites are even related to the topic you originally set to search for.
 * 5) Can be very time consuming when trying to search for quality information. [[image:http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2286/2096997304_5effa55484.jpg width="118" height="118" align="right"]]
 * 6) Outdated data (a lot of sites can be outdated depending on the search topic and how rapidly it is changing).
 * 7) Inaccurate data (what can be used as reliable academic/professional sources, to find the accuracy and validity of the website or blog, you'll have to cross check it with actually reliable sources, etc).



For digital natives who have grown up in this digital environment, they may have been influenced and read inaccurate and poor quality information when surfing the web on topics of interests thus they wouldn't know any better when trying to actually look for quality information. Even though the information on the Internet is free, it does require a lot of patience, effort, extreme caution and skill to collect useful quality information from it. Yet there is hope for improvement with professional Internet market researchers trying to use various tools, create new ones and use various search engine techniques to find and narrow down quality information. Example is Google and the Google account and how you can personalize your search and use auto-searching to help out in your research. They are also trying to get Google to try and make sense of an actual question and phrase, not just the literal meaning and words but the actual context of it.