The life of a ‘digital native’

There have been many claims about the characteristics of the new generation of ‘digital native’ students participating in higher education. The lack of empirical evidence upon which many of these early claims were based has been highlighted in a number of studies investigating students’ technology ownership. However, very few studies to date have explored in detail students’ day-to-day interactions with technology and the impact on their academic studies. In the current project multiple case studies were compiled to provide an in-depth exploration of technology use across university students’ everyday life and academic study contexts. This paper reports on one of these case studies as a profile of a ‘digital native’ student who, whilst considering themselves advanced users of technology, still demonstrated a wide variance in adoption and appropriation of technology challenging the notion of a homogeneous generation who share common technology-related characteristics.