Week Eight - Task One: What is digital immigration?

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

Digital immigration is a term coined by Marc Prensky that describes people who haven’t been born into and grown up in a world of technology – they have seen technology develop and had to learn the literacy necessary to use it. The counterpart to digital immigration is digital nativism. Digital natives are people who have grown up (in general this is people born after the 1980’s) surrounded by technology – the internet, mobile phones, mp3 players etc.

The people who care about this topic are educational professionals, who need to understand the topic further in order to decide whether a new design of education system is required. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser are two people who particularly care about this subject as they have initiated a research project on the subject of digital natives.

The attitudes based upon digital immigration and digital nativism are varied, but are mainly based around the issue of education. Authors such as Marc Prensky and Thomas Brady believe a massive change in the way students are taught is necessary. Others take an opposing view, such as Timothy VanSlyke, who thinks that digital immigrants and digital natives are not that different, as many people who Prensky would class as digital immigrants are actually very comfortable with technology.

http://www.digitalnative.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
http://www.enterprisenews.com/archive/x2103875334