Abstract
South African university students are on the frontline of a global world. Whether they are attending university in the rural Eastern Cape or urban Johannesburg, the social practice of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has enabled virtual global mobility. The internet has opened up an opportunity for them to easily cross beyond the borders of South Africa and become part of an experience in another part of the world while the cellphone has facilitated this mobility anytime any place. This paper focuses on the students who are migrants into this digital world through analysis of their technology discourses and the role this has in how they engage with and within this digital environment. Using Gee‘s notion of big ‘D’ and little ‘d’ D(d)iscourses (1996), I have examined the meanings held by students in relation to technology. This analysis of language provides insights into students’ educational and social identities and the position of globalisation and the information society in both facilitating and constraining their participation and future opportunities.
Highlights
The end of apartheid initiated an intense period of focus on social equity and redress post-1994
The idea that technology could drive some form of transformation quickly gained prominence in South African national policy documents, such as The National Plan for Higher Education (Department of Education, 2001), The National Research and Development Strategy (Department of Arts Culture Science and Technology, 2002), the National Research and Technology Foresight Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Report (Department of Science and Technology, 2000), and the White Paper on e-Education (Department of Education, 2003), all of which assume that ICTs are central to improving education
The motivation for this research arose from research on South African university students' access to and use of ICTs for learning at university
Summary
The end of apartheid initiated an intense period of focus on social equity and redress post-1994. Operating from this educational context, Gee's work has focused on language and literacy acquisition as a form of socialization both for in schools (1994) and, more recently, in terms of literacy, learning and gaming (2003) His premise is that literacy in and of itself leads to no higher order, global cognitive skills (Gee, 1994), but that literacy acquisition is a form of socialization into a mainstream way of taking meanings, of making sense of experiences and that as students participate in different literacy practices, they begin to partake of this set of values and norms, of this world view. It is likely that these students report a high self-efficacy and confidence with regards to technology use because that is what they feel but we need to be conscious that this does not necessarily equate to their actual knowledge and ability Focusing on this group of marginalized students (migrants to the digital world), we see that students with different Discourse identities approach this migration differently. Many students do not exercise individual agency and just go with the flow but still feel outsiders, marginalized, excluded, lost, and powerless
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