1) Digital Immigration

When trying to find out what Digital Immigrants actually mean, it took me such a long time to find a journal or any website on the inet that actually stated what it meant. However, one document that i came across was 'Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants' which is written by Marc Prenksy.


In this journal, Prensky talks about 'the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.' He states the today's students spend 'their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age,' I'm sure you that are reading this can probably relate yourselves to have used many of them, i sure have. Due to this, Prensky describes us being as 'native speakers of the digital language.' However, what do we call the rest of them who were not born in the 'digital age'? They are in fact, as Prensky calls them - 'Digital Immigrants'; who are 'fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology'. Additionally, Prenksy states that these 'Digital immigrants' have there own 'digital immigrant accent'. He tries to give an understanding of how this 'accent' works by describing how these 'digital immigrants' would 'print out an email to edit it rather than editing it on the screen'. But, what is the problem with this?;





'Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of a pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.'





The general attitude that Prensky discusses about the two is whether or not 'digital immigrants' should continue to educate the new 'digital natives' the same way as they were educated, or whether they would be successful in teaching the 'digital natives' through their 'language'. Prensky can not decide which one would be harder - 'learning new stuff' or 'learning new ways to do old stuff.' He thinks the latter will be more successful.



However, think back to when you were educated. I can remember using text books and most of the time i was quite bored, however as a child i always thought school was quite boring. Do you think if our 'digital immigrants' when were at school would have used our new 'native language' that we might have been more interested in education, and would have learnt more? After all, i am not doubting the way i was educated because i would like to believe i have been well educated and have been successful, i myself have got to university whilst still being educated at school via the 'digital immigrants language'.



The article in which i got this inofrmation from is:

http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf