Sailing into uncharted waters - the impact of new media use on education

In the course of the last decade, media consumption patterns among young people have changed markedly. A substantial proportion of teenagers and young adults in industrialised countries now have access to and make use of computers, the Internet, games consoles and mobile devices in addition to “old” media such as television and radio. The hypothesis in this paper is that out-of-school media use has an impact on the cognitive and affective development of our students and therefore has implications for educational policy and practice. The first section addresses the terms “media” and “media consumption” and illustrates current use of media by teenagers and young adults. Research findings on media consumption – with games as an example provide us with cues about the cognitive, affective, cultural and social consequences of out-of-school media use. The second section analyses changes in the supply of electronic media from a macro-economic perspective and looks at forecasts for the near to medium future. As a consequence, we can expect that changes in the media consumption of our students will continue. The third section attempts to show how we can make use of research on media supply and media consumption to help plan the use of information and communication technologies for teaching and learning in education.