Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants

With the rapid inception of ITC into traditional learning environments, educational practitioners have grappled with the expectation of its immediate application into their workplaces.  In conjunction with the rapid-paced ITC movement, educators and learners were categorized as either ‘digital immigrants’ or ‘digital natives’, thus making assumptions about learner capacity to embrace ICT.

Digital immigrants have been defined as, lacking ICT exposure and learning differently. Whereas, ‘digital natives’ are considered to have had comprehensive exposure to ICT (Prensky 2001, p. 1) and  being “fearless in embracing technology” (Tedx , 2015).

Prensky (2001), neglects to identify educators as learners, yet educators have been expected to instruct learners in ICT, without training.  Such terminology creates assumptions, rather than strategically implementing  ICT within workplaces.  Whereas, Kirschner and Bruyckere (2017), establish essential links between the success of ICT implementation and design of tools utilised, encompassing cognitive, meta-cognitive and  pedagogical knowledge and content (p. 140).

The inception of ICT in education, without the formation of strategies for ICT tool implementation along with assumptions regarding learners has formulated a hypothesises, that lacks foundation, when measured against learning theories in general.

 

References

Kirschner, P. A., & De Bruyckere, P. (2017). The myths of the digital native and the multitasker.

Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 135 -142

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.001

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5).

https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1108/10748120110424816

TEDx Talks. (2015). Sreenivasan. S: Digital natives vs. digital immigrants [Video]. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_9gI0B4nS4&feature=emb_title

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