Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and university freshmen

Young people who grow up with the Internet are called the Net generation and theymight be more impressively technologically literate, more accepting new technology andmore technically facile than the former generations. The Net generation is very fluentwith ICTs to participate and meet the demands of the 21st century. In this context, thisstudy is an attempt to see the level of ICT literacy of new entrant undergraduates to SriLankan universities by examining their usage of digital technologies and communicationtools, self rated skill levels on digital technology related activities and finally theirperceptions of the impact of ICT on academic work in the universities. The study iscompiled with data from questionnaires, placed with 1601 first year students, in thirteenuniversities of Sri Lanka. Questionnaire for the study was designed to gather data in threemajor areas; background Information, access to ICT and perceptions on the impact ofICT on academic experience. The data collected from the questionnaire was analyzedusing the Minitab® Release 14.1 and the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Scientists)13.0 for windows, occupying a variety of statistical techniques. Descriptive statistics wasused to produce statistics for each variable or for subsets within a variable. Chi-squaretest, Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance test and Friedman test were employedwas occupied to reach the objectives of the study. The results reveal that there is a rapidtrend towards becoming university freshmen as much as be digital literate. Most of thefirst year students use the computer applications and have indicated that they are muchmore skillful with them. Results also reveal that ICT usage frequencies and the self ratedskills of ICTs are greater for the male students than females. First years who belong tourban communities believe that they are more skillful and use ICT more frequently. ICTskills and usage amongst students of the Arts streams are somewhat lower than the rest.The majority of freshmen believe that using ICTs is likely to help them to improve theirlearning in the university and are willing to use ICTs to search for information foracademic purposes. They wish to have more access to Internet/E-mail facilities and ICTrelated equipment such as laptop computers, pen drives. It is recommended that more facilities and ICT related training are provided for freshmen, and at the village levelliteracy is improved by providing more facilities.Keywords: ICT literacy, digital technology skills, use of IC