A child using a tablet
The term digital native describes a person that grows up in the digital age, rather than acquiring familiarity with digital systems as an adult, as a digital immigrant. Both terms were used as early as 1996 as part of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
They were popularized by education consultant Marc Prensky in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,
in which he relates the contemporary decline in American education to
educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students.
His article posited that "the arrival and rapid dissemination of
digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had changed
the way students think and process information, making it difficult for
them to excel academically using the outdated teaching methods of the
day. In other words, children raised in a digital, media-saturated
world, require a media-rich learning environment to hold their
attention, and Prensky dubbed these children "digital natives".
Globally, 30 percent of the population born between 1988 and 1998 had used the Internet for over five years as of 2013.
Origins
Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Marc Prensky
defines the term "digital native" and applies it to a new group of
students enrolling in educational establishments referring to the young
generation as "native speakers" of the digital language of computers,
videos, video games, social media and other sites on the internet.
Contextually, his ideas were introduced after a decade of worry over
increased diagnosis of children with ADD and ADHD, which itself turned out to be largely overblown.
Prensky did not strictly define the digital native in his 2001 article,
but it was later, arbitrarily, applied to children born after 1980,
because computer bulletin board systems and Usenet were already in use at the time.
The idea became popular among educators and parents, whose
children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native, and has
since been embraced as an effective marketing tool.
It is important to note that Prensky's original paper was not a
scientific one, and that no empirical data exists to support his claims.
However, the concept has been widely addressed in the academic
literature since, mainly in education research, but also in health research.
Prensky has since abandoned his digital native metaphor in favor "digital wisdom". More recently, the Digital Visitor and Resident idea has been proposed as an alternative to understanding the various ways individuals engage with digital technology.
People who were "born digital", first appeared in a series of presentations by Josh Spear beginning in May 2007. A Digital Native research project is being run jointly by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. A collaborative research project is being run by Hivos, Netherlands and the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. The Net Generation Encountering e-learning at university project funded by the UK research councils was completed in March 2010. More recently the Museum of Social Media, launched in 2012, has included an exhibition about "Digital Natives & Friends."
Conflicts between generations
Due
to the obvious divide set between digital natives and digital
immigrants, sometimes both generations are forced to meet which commonly
results in conflicting ideologies of digital technology.[citation needed]
The everyday regimen of work-life is becoming more technologically
advanced with improved computers in offices, more complicated machinery
in industry etc. With technology moving so fast, it is hard for digital immigrants to keep up. This creates conflicts among older supervisors and managers with the increasingly younger workforce.
Similarly, parents clash with their children at home over gaming,
texting, YouTube, Facebook and other Internet technology issues. Much of
the world's Millennials and Generation Z members are digital natives. According to law professor and educator John Palfrey,
there may be substantial differences between digital natives and non
digital natives, in terms of how people see relationships and
institutions and how they access information. In spite of this, the timetable for training young and old on new technology is about the same.
Prensky states that education is the single largest problem facing the digital world
as our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language
(that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that
speaks an entirely new language. Digital natives have had an increased
exposure to technology, which has changed the way they interact and
respond to digital devices.
In order to meet the unique learning needs of digital natives, teachers
need to move away from traditional teaching methods that are
disconnected with the way students learn today. For the last 20 years, technology preparation for teachers has been at the forefront of policy.
However, Immigrants suffer complications in teaching natives how to
understand an environment which is "native" to them and foreign to
Immigrants. Teachers not only struggle with proficiency levels and their
abilities to integrate technology into the classroom, but also, display
resistance towards the integration of digital tools.
Since technology can be frustrating and complicated at times, some
teachers worry about maintaining their level or professionalism within
the classroom. Teachers worry about appearing "unprofessional" in front of their students.
Although technology presents challenges in the classroom, it is still
very important for teachers to understand how natural and useful these
digital tools are for students.
To meet the unique learning needs of digital natives, Forzani and
Leu suggest that digital tools are able to respond immediately to the
natural, exploratory, and interactive learning style of students today.
Learning how to use these digital tools not only provides unique
learning opportunities for digital natives, but they also provide
necessary skills that will define their future success in the digital
age. One preference to this problem is to invent computer games
to teach digital natives the lessons they need to learn, no matter how
serious. This ideology has already been introduced to a number of
serious practicalities. For example, piloting an unmanned aerial vehicle
(UAV) in the army consists of someone sitting in front of a computer
screen issuing commands to the UAV via a hand-held controller which
resembles, in detail, the model of controllers that are used to play
games on an Xbox 360 game console. (Jodie C Spreadbury, Army Recruiting and Training Division).
Gamification
as a teaching tool has sparked interest in education, and Gee suggests
this is because games have special properties that books cannot offer
for digital natives.
For instance, gamification provides an interactive environment for
students to engage and practice 21st century skills such as
collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, and digital literacy.
Gee presents four reasons why gamification provides a distinct way of
learning to promote 21st century skills. First, games are based on
problem solving and not on ones ability to memorize content knowledge.
Second, gamification promotes creativity in digital natives where they
are encouraged to think like a designer or modify to redesign games.
Third, digital natives are beginning to co-author their games through
the choices they make to solve problems and face challenges. Therefore,
students' thinking is stimulated to promote meta-cognition
since they have to think about their choices and how they will alter
the course and outcome of the game. Lastly, through online gaming,
digital natives are able to collaborate and learn in a more social
environment.
Based on the literature, one can see the potential and unique benefits
digital tools have. For example, online games help digital natives meet
their unique learning needs. Furthermore, online gaming seems to provide
an interactive and engaging environment that promotes the necessary
skills digital natives will need to be successful in their future.
Discourse
Different approaches to educate the digital native
Not everyone agrees with the language and underlying connotations of the digital native.
The term, by definition, suggests a familiarity with technology that
not all children and young adults who would be considered digital
natives have; some instead have an awkwardness with technology that not
all digital immigrants have. For instance, those on the disadvantaged side of the digital divide
lack access to technology. In its application, the concept of the
digital native preferences those who grow up with technology as having a
special status, ignoring the significant difference between familiarity
and creative application.
The classification of people into digital natives and digital
immigrants is controversial. Some digital immigrants surpass digital
natives in tech savvy, but there is a belief that early exposure to
technology fundamentally changes the way people learn. The term "digital
immigrant" overlooks the fact that many people born before the digital
age were the inventors, designers, developers and first users of digital
technology and in this sense could be regarded as the original
"natives". To confuse the prolific (and arguably superficial) use of
digital technology by current adolescents as deep knowledge and
understanding is potentially misleading and unhelpful to the discourse.
The term also discounts the broader and more holistic knowledge,
experience and understandings that older generations may have about
digital technologies and their potential place in society. Digital
immigrants are believed to be less quick to pick up new technologies
than digital natives. This results in the equivalent of a speaking accent when it comes to the way in which they learn and adopt technology.
A commonly used example is that a digital immigrant may prefer to print
out a document to edit it by hand rather than doing onscreen editing.
The actual classification of people into immigrants and natives
is tricky as the adoption of digital technology hasn't been a unified
phenomenon worldwide. For North America, most people born prior to 1980
are considered digital immigrants. Those closer to the cutoff are
sometimes called digital intermediates, which means they started using
digital technology in their early teens and thus are closer to digital
natives in terms of their understanding and abilities.
The term "digital native" is synonymous with the term "digital
inclusion". Being digitally included means that you are innately able in
using a smartphone or computer tablets: modern technology has enabled
the non-speaking to speak, the non-hearing to hear and the non-seeing to
see. Crucially, there is debate over whether there is any adequate evidence for claims made about digital natives and their implications for education. Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008),
for example, critically review the research evidence and describe some
accounts of digital natives as having an academic form of a moral panic.
concluded that generation does not explain differences in how learners
use technology and that there is no empirical research to support claims
made by Prensky and other proponents of the idea of the digital native.
Using such a terminology is rather a sign of unfamiliarity and
exoticism in relation to digital culture. Of course, nobody is "born
digital"; as with any cultural technology, such as reading and writing,
it is matter of access to education and experience.
It considers that all youths are digital natives in the modern
age. However, this is not the case. It is primarily based on cultural
differences and not by age. According to Henry Jenkins (2007), "Part of
the challenge of this research is to understand the dynamics of who
exactly is, and who is not, a digital native and what that means."
There are underlying conflicts on the definition of the term "digital
natives" and it is wrong to say that all modern age youths are placed in
that particular category or that all older adults can be described as
digital immigrants. Some adults are more tech savvy than a lot of
children, depending on socio-economic standings, personal interests,
etc., but as teachers we must include the world outside with which the
children are familiar and use it inside the classroom.
The formulation of digital native is also challenged by
researchers looking at emerging technology landscapes. The current
discourse concentrates largely on developed technology and has a
particular bias towards white, middle-class youth who have the privilege
of access to technology. Nishant Shah (2009) says, "It is necessary to
promote research that grasps that not all Digital Natives are equal.
Each context will have certain norms by which digital nativity is
understood and experienced. Dismantling the universal Digital Native and
considering contextualized Digital Native identities might also help us
move away from speaking of the Digital Native as a necessarily elite
power-user of technology and understand the identity as a point of
departure from earlier technology-mediated identities within those
contexts." He also suggests that one way of understanding "digital
natives" is to look at how they use digital technologies to engage with
their immediate environments and initiate processes of social and
personal change.
It is possible to argue that digitality
is not a birth-right but instead a product of cultural capital.
According to its originator, Pierre Bordieu, cultural capital is defined
as "the possession of certain cultural competencies, bodies of cultural
knowledge, that provide for distinguished modes of cultural
consumption".
Familiarity with technology and ease of use is a form of social capital
that allows those who possess it to advance in society. In fact,
scholars have commented on the variability of technological literacy in
different social groups. In "Communities, Cultural Capital and the
Digital Divide", Viviana Rojas calls this phenomenon a person's
"techno-disposition". This familiarity with technology is one of many
privileges granted by cultural capital. She defines techno-disposition
more explicitly as "practices, perceptions and attitudes, technical
education, awareness of technology, desires for information, job
requirements, social relations with community members and community
organizations, and geographical location". One's techno-disposition, not simply one's access to technology, she argues, is at the root of any digital divide.
As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, others are
calling into question Prensky's Digital/Immigrant dichotomy on
different grounds. Jones & Shao (2011)
recently conducted a literature review for the UK Higher Education
Academy which found that there was no empirical evidence of a single new
generation of young students. They argued that complex changes were
taking place but there was no evidence of a generation gap. The nature
of the metaphor
itself is challenged, with White and Le Cornu (2011) drawing attention
to the difficulties that a language-based analogy introduces, especially
when then linked to age and place. They also highlight the rapid
technological advances that have been made in the last ten years, most
notably in the advent of social networking platforms. White and Le Cornu
therefore propose an alternative metaphor of Visitors and Residents which they suggest more accurately represents the ways in which learners engage with technology in a social networking age.
Ignoring debate on definitions, "Digital Natives mastering our
world", published in 2017, assumes that we are already living in a
digital world, and that it will be more intense in the future. Hence,
educating all children to become citizens of this world is a necessary
goal. The book is indeed a proposal for teaching the 4th R, rendering
the remote, including the creation of learning materials, digital,
visual, and narrative, each employing the principles of the others. To
establish an alphabet of creative need, experiments in visual thinking
and pattern recognition must guide the process. For author Elihu
Blotnick, native means natural, and digital means coded. Coding then is
but a translatable language, best understood through immersion.
Nature-centered learning, even at a two-room school in a redwood grove,
suggests a reconsidered lesson plan, digitally oriented, to demonstrate
the promise and the possibilities ahead, where the digital is seen not
just as a tool but as the subject itself, essential to all other
subjects and the basis for MeTech, a new curriculum. From the oral
culture of pre-school we can then advance to the written library that
shapes abstract understanding. When technology shadows art, art also
creates technology, and learning will be naturally received.
