Digital Natives

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"digital natives," = the generation who has grown up with digital technology as a part of their everyday lives.

(frequently opposed to Digital Immigrants)


Description

"Today’s students - K through college - represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors [emphasis original]. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from ours - as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in a minute.

What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their “accent,” that is, their foot in the past. [What is wrong with that? -ed] The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. [What’s wrong with RTFM? That’s how I learned my trade! -ed] Today’s older folk were “socialized” differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you - an even “thicker” accent); needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). I’m sure you can think of one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?” phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.” (original source unknown, but cited in [1]


Discussion

Supportive Survey

According to EDC, these students have technical acumen beyond any previous generation. They are characterized by their ability to "leverage the internet to the highest degree conceivable" and are energized by technology well past the point of most digital "immigrants"--that is, older learners forced to adapt from the analog age.

"The Certiport survey validated many of our observations that, among digital natives, there is a group of 'Power Users' of ICT," said Joyce Malyn-Smith, director of strategic initiatives for education, employment, and community programs for EDC. "This group [is] in tune with what is needed for success in the 21st century, exhibiting many of the collaborative learning, analytical thinking, and problem-solving interests that are sought by today's employers.

Malyn-Smith said those who operate as Power Users exhibit "engineer-level thinking that we don't normally expect [students] to have until they enter post-secondary engineering programs." (http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6087)


Counter-argument

"As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.

College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is the price of books.

Of course they use Google, but not very well — just like my 75-year-old father. And they fill the campus libraries at all hours, just as Americans of all ages are using libraries in record numbers. (According to the American Library Association, visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to 2004).

What do we miss when we pay attention only to the perceived digital prejudices of American college students? Most high-school graduates in the United States do not end up graduating from four-year universities with bachelor's degrees. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2007 only some 28 percent of adults 25 and older had completed bachelor's degrees or higher. Is it just college-educated Americans who are eligible for generational status?

Talk of a "digital generation" or people who are "born digital" willfully ignores the vast range of skills, knowledge, and experience of many segments of society. It ignores the needs and perspectives of those young people who are not socially or financially privileged. It presumes a level playing field and equal access to time, knowledge, skills, and technologies. The ethnic, national, gender, and class biases of any sort of generation talk are troubling. And they could not be more obvious than when discussing assumptions about digital media." (http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm?)

More information

  1. Comment at [2]
  2. Specialized blog by Jesse Baer at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/digitalnatives/
  3. Discussion: The Digital Native Divide
  4. Specialized delicious tag to monitor topic: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Youth