Marc Prensky

Marc Prensky’s uses of the terms “Digital Immigrants” and “Digital Natives” is in many ways appropriate given the considerable differences technology has made in how people learn and what they experience. Inevitably, one question that I have to ask myself is, which group do I belong to? I was born in 1979, so the answer is not as obvious as it would be if I were born in 1950 or 1990.
In many ways, it seems as though I am a Digital Native. My family got a PC when I was very young, and I cannot really remember life without one. I started using computers for educational purposes in elementary school. I grew up playing video and computer games, listening to CDs, and watching TV (and too much of it). I made considerable use of computers for high school classes. In college, I used the internet as my main source of world news, and I started shopping on it. Neither of these activities seemed exotic or difficult to master. I am quite accustomed to using computers and digital databases for research – using their older paper equivalents to find something would almost seem daunting. By the time I was taking math classes calculators had become common. To perform complex functions using tables or other older methods seems archaic and cumbersome. My math teachers brought tables out to show how they had to use them when they were students, back in the “dark ages.” If asked to perform calculations in that way now, I would be unable. I generally do not carry out actions like the “Digital Immigrant Accents” that Prensky describes. Perhaps the biggest single activity indicative of being a native is that I do not think twice about going to the internet to get information – it is where I usually go first. It does not seem strange or novel to read a news source from another part of the world. When some organization calls me on the telephone, I tell them I will check out their website for more information. When I am trying to figure out how to get somewhere, I will often use an internet site like Mapquest rather that use a traditional street map.
However, I am very clearly much less of a digital native than children born later. I was not born into a world that was saturated with digital technology to the extent that it is now. I did not use the internet in any significant capacity until high school. The computers and programs were very crude by today’s standards – I grew up with DOS, not Windows. I listened to walkmans and portable CD players, not Ipods. While I made extensive use of computers in education, for much of the time that was restricted to word processing. Many people younger than me are much more proficient with technology. I often feel like a clumsy oaf compared to them. I may have been born into a digital word, but that world was far less static than it had been in the past. As I was growing up, technology was changing both education and society in general. I was not born into the world those changes created. Instead, the world I was born into, although already filled with technology, would be very different by the time I reached college.
This fact was demonstrated recently when I visited an elementary school. I helped several children to use the internet site Yahooligans to do a research exercise on Martin Luther King, and two things became apparent because of it. One was that the second graders were using the internet, something I did not do until high school. The second was that I thought it was odd they told me that they had not used the internet before, even though I was years away from doing so when I was their age. So perhaps on closer examination splitting people into either Digital Immigrants or Digital Natives is too simplistic. As for the idea that the brains of Native and Immigrants are different, I am not sure that I like it. It might mean that my brain is something of a missing link.