At some point, nearly everyone has had the experience of feeling like an immigrant, being a stranger in a new place. Today, a new immigrant group is taking over classrooms across the world. These immigrants are teachers who have newly entered a virtual landscape of social networking, text messaging and blogging, where the natives speak a seemingly unfamiliar language. Anyone who was not born into a tech-savvy world (i.e., anyone born before 1983) can be labeled a digital immigrant. Marc Prensky believes that the generation gap separates today’s students (the digital natives) from their teachers (the digital immigrants). This comparison can be used to help understand the differences between those who are comfortable with technology and those who are not. Prensky believes educators must change the way they teach; postulating that digital immigrants must learn to communicate with digital natives, because the natives are essentially unable to understand the immigrants’ old ways of getting an idea across.
With all due respect, Mr. Prensky, we disagree. Bridging the gap between immigrants and natives should be a mutual, not a one-way, process; it involves merging and building upon the language each group speaks to engage digital native learners and to empower digital immigrants. With training and experience, digital immigrants can learn to use the Web and technology to enhance the way they teach. For example, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet Technology believes that we can use digital natives’ technological fluency to strengthen social institutions. We think that’s a step in the right direction.
In our next blog entry, we’ll talk about how students, despite being digital natives, are actually not all that great at using the Internet effectively.
Jennifer O'Neill
Education Writer
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