#digitalimmigrant

“The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.” (Prensky, 2001)

Read the full article via his website: www.marcprensky.com

I was born in 1985, which makes me 31 today.  I realize that I was born in a very special time in history.  I remember cassettes.  I remember making collect calls from the movie theater or after school sports to get a ride home.  I remember getting a cell phone and the only thing I could do on it was play a stupid little game called snake, or call Mom if I really needed to.  I grew up in a house that had a computer, but all I did on it as a kid was play PacMan.  We didn’t get the internet until I was in middle school.

There aren’t a lot of people who can straddle the fence like this.  I feel lucky enough to remember a time when if you made plans with someone, you kept them, because there was no last minute text option to cancel.  I remember a time when instant gratification wasn’t the norm and things were not always at our fingertips.  There was a time before Wikipedia, when real encyclopedias existed, and sometimes I even asked a real librarian, in a library, for help.

However, technology was introduced at a very young age.  We did have that computer upstairs that barely did anything.  I also had the original Nintendo.  When I was 14 and got my first cell phone, I figured that thing out in a day (there wasn’t much to it).  I was also eager to learn about technology and saw how important it was going to be.  

Alas, despite my familiarity with technology, I am an immigrant.  I was not born into a world with a Facebook account.  I signed up for one as a freshman in college, at the age of 18.  While I work at an Apple store, and my life is literally inundated with technology, it has not always been this way. 

I feel that being young enough to embrace technology wholeheartedly, yet old enough to remember a time without it, puts me and people around my age in a funny situation.  There aren’t many of us, and we will soon be seen as old.  We will be those people who actually had a visor in their car full of CD’s we burned ourselves using files downloaded from Napster.  I consider it a privilege to have known both worlds first-hand, lucky enough to easily embrace change at a young age, yet mature enough to realize the value in a world that relied less on technology and more on interpersonal connections, local neighborhoods, and physical communities that we partook in more actively.  There are so many great things about technology and how it connects people differently, but there was a quaint-ness, almost provincial feeling about growing up in a suburb of Boston without an internet connection and only a single telephone for my family of four.  

A ‘digital native’ is defined as a person who was born into the widespread adoption of digital technology at an early age, these people were born in 1980 or after, anyone born before this year are considered ‘digital immigrants’.

I do believe personally that digital natives exist in today’s day and age as we are surrounded by technology and information easily accessible at the touch of a finger. As soon as we walk into a classroom these days it is prevalent that technology plays a big role in our education system. Compared to years ago during the educative years ‘digital immigrants’ grew up in we can compare the drastic differences, to gather information for a school project the students would have to go to their nearest libraries and spend countless hours researching to gather the adequate information they needed for it. Nowadays we walk into a classroom with countless computers, laptops, iPad’s, smartphones and other technologies that all students are able to access at a touch of a finger and have an endless supply of information and facts.

One point I would like to argue and consider that not all 36 year olds and younger can be considered digital natives in our world. As some countries are very well off, there are third world countries that aren’t living in the conditions we do and do not have access to the internet and technologies let alone clean water and food. These people would not be considered digital natives as they do not have the resources and support from the outside sources like we fortunate.

Isitilah Digital Native bisa juga kita sematkan pada anak-anak yang lahir diatas tahun 2000-an. Mereka kerap dianggap juga sebagai generasi Z atau Net Generation. Karena era dimana mereka lahir terjadi perubahan yang cukup besar dalam kemajuan teknologi…