Curating the use of digital media in higher education: a case study

Digital technology constitutes a substantial presence in higher education and notions like ‘digital natives’ and ‘21st century digital skills’ dominate educational discourse. However, within the last decade, scholars have started questioning the prevailing techno-optimism and practitioners have started debating whether and how to regulate the use of digital devices. Based on a systematic qualitative analysis of 100 written evaluations and mapping sessions with five students, this study explores students’ experiences in an undergraduate course in which the teacher restricted the use of digital devices in discussion classes. We found that students expressed mostly positive attitudes towards resulting class engagement and mostly negative attitudes towards taking, sharing, and searching their notes. Finally, we discuss our findings based on the notion of media affordances.