Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants



The arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology has created a big discontinuity between the students who are in high school and college now and those who grew up before the eighties. Today's students "think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors," according to Marc Prensky in his article "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." Prensky calls the generation that is now in high school and college "digital natives," because they are "native speakers" of the digital language of technology. Compared to them, those of us who did not grow up using the internet and texting are "digital immigrants."

In an educational context, how are digital natives different from digital immigrants? They prefer random access (like hypertext) to traditional texts. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They function best when networked, and they are used to receiving information really, really fast.

Digital immigrants, on the other hand, use technology with tell-tale signs that Prensky calls an "immigrant accent." An example of this would be calling someone to tell them that you emailed them.

The problem with this cultural difference is that digital natives are being taught by digital immigrants and it is a disconnect between the generations that involves not just ways of learning, but values about what is worth learning. One of the interesting questions that educators are wrestling with is: Should digital native students learn the old ways and old content, or should digital immigrant teachers learn the new? Prensky argues that teachers need to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. While not changing the meaning of what's imortant or what we mean by good thinking skills, we are going to have to teach these things faster, with more random access, etc.

One of the reasons I really enjoyed this article is that Prensky gave a conceptual framework and terminology to a distinction that I have been painfully aware of. I am probably what Prensky would call a digital immigrant, even though others in my generation may be digital natives. I think I may have been born on the border of that generational line; even though, through years of resisting technology, I think more like my predecessors. It's a little daunting to think of teaching children who use technology more adeptly and intuitively than I do; in a way, they speak a different language from me. I am getting practice at dealing with this disparity, though; I have a son who I lean on sometimes to "find" things for me that I've lost in my files, troubleshoot problems, etc. I guess in terms of digital natives and immigrants, I would say that he's "translating" for me.

Source:
Prensky, M. (2007). "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." In Computers in Education, 12th Edition. Annual Editions.