Week 4: What is a Digital Immigrant vs a Digital Native?

1. What is the immigrant/native divide and how has it affected the way students learn?

Digital natives are the generations that grew up in the era of technology, digital Immigrants are the generations that didn't grow up with technology.

Some digital immigrants (the flexible ones) encourage their kids, and new generations to adapt to the use of new technologies to improve their performance in school, but some other digital immigrants (non-flexible) judge constantly the idea of using technology to improve education and talk about "how good things were in the old times."

The digital immigrants that are flexible help new generations to feel comfortable using technology to improve their learning experience, therefore allowing new generations to learn faster and in different ways. The digital immigrants that are not flexible make new generations feel ashame or even reject the use of technology, which makes their learning slower, and sometimes makes new generations isolate themselves from the other students that use technology, which is the majority nowadays.

2. What category do you fall into and how has this affected your learning?

I am a Digital native because I was born in a generation that grew up with technology such as computers and cell phones. 

3. Prensky mentions that student’s thinking patterns have changed. How have they changed and what are some examples of this?

Prensky mentions that old generations believe that knowledge is acquired through a step-by-step logic, and they do not believe that a person can learn by multitasking. Also, they are more accustom to not correlate fun with studying, so they do not believe that a person could learn with video games.

According to Prensky new generations believe that learning can be fun, and are used to multitask, for example, they can listen to music while learning something new from a website. Also, they find tiresome to listen to lectures and find it hard to follow a step-by-step logic, because they are used to think of different ways to reach a solution without following steps. 

4. Draw from your creativity as you come up with one idea for how this course could implement a new Digital Native methodology for learning?

This class already does use the Digital Native methodology. It allows students to use any resources online that they want to find new information and applied in the class. For example, to find books online and share them in the forums, or other resources of information such as YouTube videos. Another thing that this class could do to improve the implementation of new Digital Native methodology for learning, is to allow other students to make suggestions to improve the way a person writes. There are persons that are more visual and need visual examples and others that like to read the words. To have feedback from all of those people could help the way we communicate so everybody can understand each other a little bit better without forgetting about anybody. 

Resources:

Marc Prensky’s article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”