Piggybacking on last week’s discussion of digital literacy, I’m going to discuss digital natives…a topic somewhat inspired by the ‘free wifi’ at a resort my friends and I stayed at several years go.
Digital Natives
Marc Prensky originally coined the term Digital Natives when looking for a term for a new generation of students: the first generation of students to grow up with digital technology. My generation, Gen Y – commonly referred to as Millenials, grew up with the emergence of digital technology. We were there for enormous CRT monitors, 14.4k dial-up modems, shouting at our parents for picking up the telephone when we’re trying to use the Internet, and have experienced many of the technological hiccups that have helped shape digital technology today.
Today, this group of digital natives seem to innately understand how to use technology. Which brings me back to my Mexican resort experience in 2013 – the resort claimed to have ‘free wifi’ in the main lobby, but neither myself nor three of my other millennial pals, who work with technology every single day, could figure out how to get connected to this elusive wifi. Meanwhile, children between the ages of 2 and 8 surrounded us, as if we had entered some digital playground, successfully connected to the Internet and doing more than the least of which we wanted to do…I just wanted to check my damn email!
Why Do I Need to Know This?!
Understanding Digital Natives is important! Why? Because as Learning and Development professionals, we need to better understand how to effectively develop training for our target audiences. This is a fact that is important for anyone working in Education. In my day-to-day, I come across individuals who are very out of touch with how their students are learning, and refuse to adapt their traditional methods of instruction (e.g. stand up lectures/chalk and talk) to address the needs of these individuals. I do see movement to adapting these teaching methods, but there’s still a great amount of resistance and frustration.
Ultimately, it’s important to understand that digital natives seem to be more comfortable when working in the digital realm than they do in more traditional contexts. While this doesn’t mean that we need to trash traditional methods entirely, it certainly does mean that we need to make certain adaptations.
When you consider digital natives in tandem with online learning, making these adaptations may also stand to increase overall accessibility to high-quality education, so while digital natives may view these educational means as an environment in which they can thrive and are eager to enrol in, we will inadvertently address accessibility issues for other generations!
Resources:
Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky
I really like your style of writing, it reads like an internal monologue of an interesting person – which it may well be ; ) Thank you for sharing!
Another great read on this subject is Networked Publics (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/networked-publics) which discusses not only the issue of digital natives and their increased comfort in the digital world, but also the growth and development of that digital world as a “public place”, where people meet, share ideas, collaborate, work and play. It talks about both the “place”, the technology, improved software, access and interface as well as growing comfort and use by individuals. It really goes into what that means in different situations, professional fields and for the individual and brings up some very interesting ideas.