Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants
- According to Prensky, what is the immigrant/native divide and how has it affected the way students learn?
According to Prensky, digital natives refer to "native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. All the students today fall into this group because they have spent their entire lives surrounded by all these digital tools. On the other hand, digital immigrants refer to individuals who were not born into the digital world, but still adopted certain aspects of modern technology due to living in this world now. It is pretty easy to notice who is a digital native or a digital immigrant due to differences in their languages. The main problem is related to education since most of the instructors and professors are digital immigrants who are trying to teach a population (students) who speak a totally different language. This can be very challenging because both of them grew up in different time periods and different settings. Education can be very hard because teachers (digital immigrants) believe that they can teach their students (digital natives) in the way they were taught many years ago and this is not the case anymore.
- Kirschner some of the myths associated with Prensky’s findings. One of the myths that he discusses is how being a ‘digital native’ doesn’t necessary mean one is ‘digitally literate’. What does she mean?
Being digitally native but not digitally literate means that one person can have all the knowledge they need about technology and the internet but they are more likely to use it in regards to entertainment and empowerment and not as a support for learning. Kirschner described them as content consumers rather than content creators. Based on the reading, I understood that he believes that nowadays all digitally native people have knowledge and experience on how to use technology, but they might not know how to use it so that they can benefit from it.
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