Digital native

Digital native

A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technology, and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts. Alternatively, this term can describe people born in the latter 1960s or later, as the Digital Age began at that time; but in most cases the term focuses on people who grew up with the technology that became prevalent in the latter part of the 20th century, and continues to evolve today.

Other popular discourse identifies a digital native as a person who understands the value of digital technology and uses this to seek out opportunities for implementing it with a view to make an impact.

This term has been used in several different contexts, such as education (Bennett, Maton & Kervin 2008), higher education (Jones & Shao 2011) and in association with the term New Millennium Learners (OECD 2008). A digital immigrant is an individual who was born before the existence of digital technology and adopted it to some extent later in life.

As Dr. Ofer Zur and Azzia Zur discuss (in 2009), not all digital immigrants are technologically inept, as they fall into a number of categories; Avoiders, Reluctant Adopters and Eager Adopters. Avoiders may only have a minimal amount of technology involved in their lives and households (e.g., a landline phone and a television set). Reluctant Adopters often see ways that technology might be needed in their lives, but they try to avoid it when possible (e.g., letters instead of emails, rotary telephones). Eager Adopters have enthusiasm or a talent for technology that makes them very similar to Digital Natives. Similarly, not all digital natives are comfortable with technology.

Contents

Origins

Marc Prensky coined the term digital native in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants published in 2001. In his seminal article, he assigns it to a new group of students enrolling in educational establishments.[1] The term draws an analogy to a country's natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, compared with immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and begin to adopt the region's customs. Prensky refers to accents employed by digital immigrants, such as printing documents rather than commenting on screen or printing out emails to save as a hard copy. Digital immigrants are said to have a "thick accent" when operating in the digital world in distinctly pre-digital ways, for instance, calling people into a room to see a webpage instead of sending them the URL. A digital native might refer to her new "camera"; but a digital immigrant might refer to his new "digital camera".

The analogy of the digital native was also used by Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan (Spear's business partner in the Manhattan-based agency Undercurrent) who talked about people who were "born digital", first appearing in a series of presentations given by Josh Spear in 2007. First, at Google's Zeitgeist[2] Europe Conference in May 2007. A different version of this presentation was delivered again in December 2007 at the United Kingdom at the Internet Advertising Bureau Engage 2007 Conference.[3] A Digital Native research project is being run jointly by the Berkman Centre 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.

Gartner presented on the term at their May, 2007 IT Expo (Emerging Trends) Symposium in Barcelona and,[4] more recently, Gartner referenced Prensky's work, specifically the 18 areas of change comprising the Work Style of Digital Natives, in their "IT-Based Collaboration and Social Networks Accelerate R&D" research paper published on January 22, 2008.

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. The everyday regime of worklife 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. What many digital immigrants miss is that digital natives grew up with technology, and it is how they connect with their friends, perform research, and feel at home. Young people are not "addicts" or "bad" simply for using the tools of the world they grow up in. In their 2011 article, Dr. Ofer Zur and Azzia Zur discuss the issue of generation clashes at home, school and the workplace.

Education, as Marc Prensky states, 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. Immigrants suffer complications in teaching natives how to understand an environment which is "native" to them and foreign to Immigrants. Prensky's own 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).[5]

Discourse

Not everyone agrees with the language and underlying connotations of the digital native.[6] It suggests a familiarity with technology that not all children and young adults who would be considered digital natives have, though some instead have an awkwardness with technology that not all digital immigrants have. This is depending on the location of the school and whether or not the students have access to these endless technologies. 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. Like animals to their natural habitat, those who were raised in a digital world naturally develop a keen perception and understanding of their surroundings. Many children in this generation are empowered through technology because of this. Thus we should be able to use and teach using these technologies or examples of these technologies that the students have grown up with.

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.

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 having an academic form of a moral panic. 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 then a lot of children are depending on socio economic standings and other things.But as teachers we must include the world outside that the children are familiar with 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 geographies and has a particular bias towards white, liberal, 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 contextualised 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.[7]

As we move into the second decade of the new millennium, others are calling into question Prensky’s Digital/Immigrant dichotomy on different grounds. Jones & Shao (2011)[8] 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.

References

Notes

  1. ^ Listen to the Natives // Marc Prensky
  2. ^ Josh Spear presentation at Zeitgeist Europe 2007
  3. ^ Wanna go to digital rehab? No No No: Talking to the born digital generation
  4. ^ "Session Description". http://agendabuilder.gartner.com/spr8/WebPages/SessionDetail.aspx?EventSessionId=900. Retrieved 2008-03-25. [dead link]
  5. ^ [1] public email b November 4th, 2007 by Paul Maunders
  6. ^ Doug Holton, [2], EdTechDev, retrieved May 2010; Jamie McKenzie, 'Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions, and Digital Deprivation' [3], From Now On: the educational technology journal, Vol 17,No 2, retrieved 29 August 2010; G Kennedy, T Judd and B Dalgarno, 2010. “Beyond Natives and Immigrants: Exploring types of net generation students”, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol 26, Issue 5, pp 332-343. Jones, C., Ramanau, R., Cross, S.J., and Healing, G. (2010). Net generation or digital natives: Is there a distinct new generation entering university? Computers & Education. Vol 54 (3) pp722-732. Jones, Chris and Shao, Binhui (2011). The net generation and digital natives: implications for higher education [4]. Higher Education Academy, York.
  7. ^ [5] Presentation at Re:publica 2010, Berlin
  8. ^ [6] Jones and Shao (2011)The net generation and digital natives: implications for higher education. Higher Education Academy, York.

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Related articles

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