Week 8-9 Digital Immigration

Find out about 'Digital Immigration'.What Is it? Who cares about it? What sort of general attitudes have been based upon it?

The term ‘Digital Immigration’ was coined by Marc Prensky. He used it to describe how students nowadays learn and interact differently to before, and believed that the education system should change accordingly. He believes that “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” He sees a generation of pupils growing up with new technologies and spending more time on computer games and watching TV than with reading and more traditional ways of learning. He believes that this has made the younger generation think and process things differently.

Digital Natives – A term that suggests young people speak the digital language of computers and new technology. They have been brought into this environment and have picked it up effortlessly

Digital Immigrant – A term describing people brought up without technology who have had to adapt to it accordingly, without ever picking it up as well as digital natives and speaking the digital language with a traditional ‘accent’

The main point of interest in the article is teachers who have been brought up as a digital immigrant are now trying to teach digital natives. He thinks that digital natives will want to learn at a fast ever-changing pace, whilst digital immigrants, although they try to keep up, will still do a lot of their work by hand and use traditional methods.

I agree with a lot of his notions, and am always interested to find out about how new media affects us. I like his approach to the subject and he brings up some interesting points. I think the only problem is that he is very general with his findings, how do we know the extent of the effects yet? And also, he assumes that all youth will have had interactions with new technology, when this is not necessarily correct.