CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the study
Digital natives, the net-generation, the digital-generation, and millenniums are all labels to identify today’s learners. Marc Prensky (2001) created the term digital native in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants to describe the generation of learners growing up interacting with digital technology. Marc Prensky (2001), educational author, noted that the average college student has spent less than 5,000 hours of his/her life reading, yet he/she has spent over 10,000 hours playing video games and 20,000 hours watching television. The National School Board Association (2007) reported teens engage in social networking almost as much as they watch television. Marc Prensky (2001) stated, “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (p.1). Media entrepreneur Rupert Murdock (2005) agreed with Prensky when he stated that today’s generation and future generations will “never know a world without ubiquitous broadband Internet access.” Referring to himself as a digital immigrant he continued, “We may never become true digital natives, but we can and must begin to assimilate to their culture and way of thinking” (Murdock, 2005, p. 1). The Nigerian Government has ambitions to raise educational attainment for all learners, and to narrow the gaps in attainment between the most and least disadvantaged children in Nigeria. Tackling youth unemployment is also a priority of the Nigerian Government. It has set a target to reduce the proportion of young people who are not in education, employment or training by 40% by 2020, and Curriculum for Excellence aims to support all children and young people to develop essential skills they will need to live and work in the twenty first century. To help pursue its ambitions, the Nigeria Government has developed initiatives to support and encourage the use of digital technology in schools, with the vision that ‘Scotland’s educators, learners and parents take full advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technology in order to raise attainment, ambition and opportunities for all’. One of the main elements of this work to date has been the delivery of Glow, an online learning environment that provides access to a variety of digital tools and resources, funded by the Scottish Government and made available to all schools across Scotland1 . Education Nigeria recently published a report on the digital technology area of Curriculum for Excellence, which found that ICT is ‘used as an enhancement to learning’ but is ‘on the fringes of the main purpose of tasks or lessons’. In some of the case study schools which provided the findings for the report, inspectors found that ICT can have ‘a much more significant influence on learning which motivates learners and encourages career ambitions using technologies’ but the extent of change in the use of technologies in schools ‘has been modest at best’. The study is of the view that there was more work to be done to place digital technology ‘at the heart of learning’ in Nigeria, and that it had confirmed ‘beyond doubt that our children and young people need digital skills and technologies to be given an absolutely central role in the learning process – no longer an enhancement or ‘bolt-on’, but a foundation and a primary consideration for any planned learning.’ The Nigerian Government has commissioned this literature review to explore how the use of digital technology for learning and teaching can support teachers, parents, children and young people in improving outcomes and achieving its ambitions for education in Nigeria. During the last ten years, there has been much focus on the place of technology in education (Hatlevik et al., 2013). Already in 2013, more than 80 percent of second-year students in upper secondary education reported that they used laptops always or regularly during class. In August 2017, the Norwegian Government presented the new digitization strategy for education, which aims to increase technology literacy among the students to make them more equipped to handle the future (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). The strategy states that educational institutions should be in a leading position in digitization as digital literacy will result in better labor market outcomes, and investments in technology at an early stage may increase returns to education drastically. The new knowledge society is based on exploiting technological advancement (Erstad et al., 2005). Gaining access to digital tools in education including laptops will, therefore, be important. However, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted in 70 countries shows that students from countries which have heavily invested in educational information and communications technology (ICT) do not perform better than students in other countries (OECD, 2015b). It is a paradox that extensive investments in digital infrastructure have been made while there is no clear guidance on how to take advantage of the digital devices in teaching (Hatlevik et al., 2009). In the report ICT in Norwegian Education 2013 Hatlevik et al. (2013) show that almost half of the students in the second year of upper secondary school find the use of laptops in classroom disturbing for their educational outcomes. Further, about half of the students agree that they use too much time on non-educational activities and that the laptop (or tablet) displace time from activities that are conducive to learning. To fully exploit the benefits of laptop use in education it must complement existing teaching methods and improve the quality of education (OECD, 2015b). The heavy investments in computers in school are made at the expense of traditional inputs such as educating better teachers and improved learning material (OECD, 2015b). For the program to be economically efficient it should yield better educational outcomes than alternative investments. During the last two decades the higher education institutions have invested heavily in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). ICT have impacted the university context, organization and the teaching and learning methods. One puzzling question is the effective impact of these technologies on student’s achievement and on the returns of education. Plethoric academic researches have tried to answer this question at the theoretical and the empirical levels. They faced two main difficulties.