Digital Natives

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants are everywhere or are they?

There are two original articles by Marc Prensky

• Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001)
• Do They Really Think Differently? (2001)

which led to the following paper by VanSlyke

• Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Some Thoughts From the Generation Gap (2003)

which led Prensky to write another article entitled

• Overcoming Educators' Digital Imigrant Accents: A Rebuttal (2003)

Whatever you might think about Prensky's analogy (and I have my doubts) the two phrases Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants have slipped into our collective vocabulary.

It is my feeling that the phrases are

• often used to hide wooly thinking,
• are used by the technologically adept to frighten the technologically less adept
• are crucially are used as catch phrases to promote argument and discussion.

I suspect that we are being misled, it may be that the tribe of digital natives are little more than a myth.