Making Sense of the Internet: Exploring Students Use of Internet-based Information Resources in University

Périne Brotcorne

Université Libre de Bruxelles

Groupe de Recherche en Informatique et Sciences Humaines (GRISH)

50, Av. Roosevelt – CP 135

B-1050 Brussels, Belgium

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005

Abstract: Whilst information technologies (ITs) are considered an increasingly important part of higher education provision and practice we know that use of technologies such as the internet varies tremendously – not only between different subject areas and years of study but also between individual students. In an attempt to account for these varying patterns this paper explores how students make sense of using IT in their academic and non academic day-to-day lives. Drawing on in-depth interview data from 41 undergraduate students in a French speaking higher education institution in Belgium, the paper explores (i) the extent to which undergraduate students are using ITs - in particular the internet - for educational purposes, and (ii) how this use fits with their wider ‘offline’ information research strategies. In this way, the paper outlines a range of educational, social, cultural and individual factors which influence students’ sense-making decisions to use or not the Internet as an academic information resource. The understanding of these rationales behind students’ IT use allows therefore to challenge some of the popular misconceptions regarding the transformative power of ITs such Internet on students’ information research practices.

Introduction

The increasing importance of information technologies (ITs) in both educational policy and practice is perhaps being most acutely experienced in higher education. In particular many educators, industrialists and policymakers assume that ITs are enabling fundamental transformations in all aspects of higher education - driving the reconstruction of the sector in the so-called “knowledge society”. New technologies such as the computer, internet and digital communications are seen to support new forms of learning and teaching as well as profoundly influencing the way teachers, researchers and students gain access to information. Visions of “virtual classrooms”, “virtual libraries” and “e-universities” have therefore proliferated the education technology literature. This optimistic rhetoric has influenced governments and higher education establishments to massively invest in ITs. However, despite substantial financial outlay we are still long way from the technologically-based higher education dream, which often contrasts with the low-tech “realities” of traditional campus-based universities.

In fact a critical social science discourse has gathered pace of late around higher education and ITs, countering the popularly-held but sensationalist accounts based simply on faith in technological progress. This new wave of researchers (Cuban, 2002; Dutton and Loader, 2002; Hara and Kling, 2002; Robins and Webster, 2002; Selwyn, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004; Feenberg, 2004) critique the narrow perspective of the dominant deterministic perspective of technology and higher education, which fails to address questions about how ITs currently work in practice when introduced into higher educational settings. To frame a more “realistic” discussion of technology in universities, these authors underline the need to move away from this predetermined linear model towards a multi-layered perspective which takes into account wider social, political, economic and cultural concerns (Selwyn, 2000). Rooted into the social shaping of technology perspective (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1996; Williams and Edge, 1996), this alternative sociological approach underscores the set of options that technology offer to the university. However, those options are not unlimited but bounded within its social, institutional and historical contexts. (Cuban, 1986; Pelletier, 2005). In this vein, some researchers complain in particular about the lack of extensive empirical studies that take a contextual student-centred perspective, arguing that educational computing literature fails to adequately consider the needs of those who are primarily concerned by the university transformation into a ‘digital academe’ (Barto, 1996; Loveless, 1996; Selwyn, 1997, Dutton and Loader, 2002). Thus, it is time to address questions about the way ITs are integrated into students’ academic and non-academic day-to-day practices, as well as exploring the factors which mediate university students’ (non) engagement with ITs during their time at the university. (Hara and Kling, 2002; Selwyn, 2002). These questions are often obscured by the popular stereotyping of current generations of university students - the so-called ‘Nintendo generation’ - seen as inherently technology competent and confident. However, beyond this weak conception of the expert user-student, little is known about the “student realities” of IT use in universities. Deconstructing this “black box” (Bijker and Law, 1992) may then help to better understand what role can and, maybe more important, cannot play ITs in higher education.

Looking at the Students’ Side of the Fence: Towards a “Sense-making” Approach of IT Use in Educational Settings

To address these shortcomings, the present paper examines ‘the students’ side of the fence’ when it comes to technology use. Here we can turn for inspiration to a range of other literatures which have looked at user interactions with new technology. Indeed, for more than thirty years, a vast body of theoretical and empirical research has been generated in the fields of psychology, human-computer interaction and library/information studies – all attempting to understand what motivates people to use or not use ITs and the attendant barriers to usage. Most of the accounts conventionally assume that physical access to technology automatically leads to use. This is most famously shown in the work of Everett Rogers (1995) and his model of “the progressive take-up of technology in society”, the notion of “access” strictly conceived in terms of technological infrastructure, has led analyses to focus on material and socio-demographic factors (e.g., income, education, gender, age, and ethnicity) to explain an individual’s engagement with ITs. Although this ‘natural diffusion’ thesis still pervades many popular accounts of technology use, some academics recognize that neither the availability of ITs nor socio-demographic characteristics are enough to explain whether individuals engage with ITs or not. Therefore, another established way to address technology user acceptance-related issues is from the user-psychological perspective. In this view, individual differences - especially in terms of an individual’s attitudes and feelings - are considered as factors explaining adoption of ITs. Although not always conclusive, such research literature conventionally develops models for predicting user acceptance and for measuring IT-related attitudes and skills. In this line of research, various theoretical models have been developed (e.g., Davis et al, 1989; Igbaria and Iivari, 1995; Thompson, Higgins and Howell, 1991), giving rise to a wealth of empirical studies in different contexts - including higher education (e.g., Al-Jabri and Al-Khaldi, 1997; Levine and Donita-Schmidt, 1998).

From both the diffusion and psychological perspectives, IT literacy is often defined as a set of generic and universal skills to be learned, attaching IT adoption ‘failure’ primarily in terms of users’ personal attributes. Despite claims of taking a user-centred approach, such viewpoints lack explanatory power regarding the nature and the content of people’s uses. As noted by Marcuum (2002), the user-psychological perspective is, paradoxically, more technology-oriented than user-oriented. By asking what kind of attitudes and beliefs individuals should have to succeed in IT use, it confines ITs to a “black box”. Thus most user acceptance studies are based on the unquestioned notion that there exists a given, uniform and generic set of attitudes and knowledge that promote IT use. In this vein, most discussions of students’ use of internet-based information in educational settings have been focused on concerns over the ability of students to access and use an abundance of online information in an effective manner. Thus, much attention has been paid to technological issues concerning the construction and provision of the content. If students have been considered it is then only in terms of their ‘information literacy’ patterns.

However, recent social research that has been carried out in this area has attempted to revisit the conventional explanations of (non)use of technology based on the assumption that not using IT is due to individual’s deficiency. Moving away from this prevailing deficit model of IT use, a range of empirical studies have then highlighted that individuals’ engagement with IT is a more complex matter based on a mix of psychological, economic and, above all, pragmatic reasons. (Garnham, 1997; Jung et al, 2001). Aside from the well discussed issues of technological access, skills and ‘know how’, students’ academic engagement with IT has been also shown to be party to a host of wider social, cultural and individual contextual issues. One example of this is the recent study (Selwyn, 2003) which has suggested the notion of the ‘strategic’ and ‘pragmatic’ student who embeds IT use in a wider personal economy of work and time. Here then, students’ decisions to either use (or not use) ITs are not necessarily grounded in ‘rational’ issues of information quantity or quality per se. Rather, they are shaped by wider issues of hidden curricula, assessment expectations and the general ‘goodness-of -fit’ of IT use with students’ academic and non-academic lives.

From this perspective, students’ IT use is extended to a wider “sense-making” approach, which considers the situational relevance as a necessary source of meaning to understand IT use from an individual point of view. In this vein, a host of authors (REFS) have pointed towards the issues of relevance and utility as crucial mediating factors of individual’s engagement process with ITs, with individuals need to consider using IT as being useful, fruitful, and significant before deciding to engage with this technology. In this sense, as Selwyn (2004) noted, “the notion of “meaning” can be seen as being the heart of individual IT user’s concerns”. To develop a more comprehensive and ‘realistic’ approach of students’ IT use, it is then necessary to take into consideration the host of underlying reasons behind students’ involvement with ITs. Such a holistic approach must seek to elicit the complex influences on students’ IT use and understand how this use makes sense contextually (or not) in their academic and non academic day-to-day lives.

Surprisingly, studies of student life - although varying greatly in terms of their scope and purposes - generally remain silent on the role that ITs play in the day-to-day academic and non academic lives of students. One example of this is the French speaking tradition of sociological research aiming to examine the different facets of the university student experience between learning and social life (Coulon, 1997; Bloss and Erlich; Dubet, 1994; Erlich, 1998, 2002; Felouzis, 2001; Grignon, 2000; Lahire, 1997). Despite examining the patterns of students’ studying conditions and approaches in detail, very little of this research – whatever adopting a macro-sociological or micro-sociological approach – has tackled questions about the way ITs are rooted in students’ academic day-to-day work. At the very most, studies dedicate one paragraph to this question (see for instance, Erlich, 1998; Grignon, 2000). Thus, to address this shortcoming in the current literature, the present paper attempts to move towards a comprehensive sense-making approach of students’ IT use and begin to consider this issue in light of the wider attitudes and engagement of students towards their university education.

Aim of the paper

Extending this ‘sense-making’ approach to the context of university students in one higher education institution in Belgium, the paper now goes on to examine (i) the extent to which undergraduate students are using ITs - in particular the internet - for educational purposes, and (ii) how this use fits with their wider ‘offline’ information research strategies. In this way, the paper seeks to explore which educational, social, cultural and individual factors are influencing students’ decisions to use or not the Internet as an academic information resource. In exploring the wider varying rationales behind individual students’ (non) engagement with the Internet for academic purposes, this paper aims to challenge some of the popular received wisdoms regarding the universal transformative power of ITs such as the internet on students’ information research practices. Although these points have long been well noted in theoretical terms in the educational literature, few studies have sought to empirically reconsider them from a university students’ perspective. Through the collection of qualitative data from undergraduates from a range of subject disciplines and year groups the paper therefore seeks to extent some of the previously highlighted theoretical ideas in a European higher education context. Moreover, the collection of data in a non-English speaking academic context also allows exploration of issues of linguistic and cultural homogenization often associated with the Internet, but little explored in this literature. With this in mind, the paper goes onto to empirically test the three following popularly held views of Internet-based information as an academic information resource, i.e.:

§  that the Internet as an academic information resources is inherently useful and convenient for all students;

§  that web-based resources supplant ‘traditional’ academic libraries and transform the nature of students’ academic research activities patterns;

§  that the abundance of online information and its instantaneous access are inherently beneficial for student’s academic research activities.

Research Method

The paper draws on student interview data collected as part of a wider multi-phase research project, which involved a three year qualitative and quantitative investigation of undergraduate students’ (non) use of ITs in one French-speaking higher education institution in Belgium. Whilst a large-scale picture of students’ information literacy patterns was gained through an initial survey of 450 students, qualitative methods were then employed to more subtly investigate the range of individualized ways and contexts of students’ IT use. With this in mind, the present paper concentrates on individual in-depth semi-structured interviews with 41 students carried out in the autumn of 2004. As can be seen in table one, interviewed students came from four subject disciplines – Psychology, Social Sciences, Communication and Humanities – and spanned the full range of different year groups. Although all volunteers, interviewees were selected to include comparable numbers of students from each subject discipline.

TABLE 1. Characteristics of Interview sample (n=41)

Gender / n
Male / 21
Female / 20
Subject discipline
Psychology / 10
Social Sciences / 11
Communication / 10
Humanities / 10
Year Group
One / 7
Two / 12
Three / 12
Four / 10
TOTAL / 41

Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and one and a half hours and covered a range open-ended questions related to students’ perceptions and use of ITs in their academic and non-academic day-to day lives. A number of more specific questions were asked relating to students’ information research strategies and the role of Internet as an academic information resource. In this way, interviews approached a “life-story” method, which enables a deeper understanding of how IT (non)use fits into students’ wider information research habits and in her life in general. All interviews were recorded audiotape and transcribed verbatim in French. The translation into English did not allow complete retention of the original grammar and punctuation of student’s responses – although care was taken to retain the general sense of responses. Analysis of the interview data was carried out using a constant comparison technique where a number of recurring themes relating to the three initial conceptions were identified. These themes are now discussed in more detail in the following sections.