Are Digital Natives a Myth or Reality?

As technology continues to evolve it makes an impact on education. This is because students are from a digital age, also being known as digital natives. This poses a challenge to teachers as they are new to the digital age.

The key topic is, should digital immigrants learn the new way or should digital natives learn the old? Which leads onto; Are digital natives a myth or reality? Different positions can be taken in relation to this topic as you can either believe that digital natives are a myth or a reality. Below presents research and my beliefs on this topic

Before engaging in this topic, I looked at the title and thought to myself, I don't know what this is going to be about, as I was thinking through the different possibilities of what it could be and if it involved me, it intrigued me to read more.

After reading, I soon discovered what these topics meant.

Digital natives are known as the people who have been brought up in the digital world. Digital immigrants are people who were brought up before the world of technology.

My knowledge expanded as I have found something that impacts me as a digital native as well as a student learning from possible digital immigrants.

(Ebuyer, 2013)

A big strength in this article to push my beliefs that Digital natives are a reality is that; “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” (Prensky, 2001)

This pushes my beliefs that digital immigrants should be learning the new, as that is what everyone is learning now and this is how the world is continuing to evolve.

This is why I believe digital natives are a reality as technology is and always will be evolving and people are having to use it for everyday things as a way to communicate, learn, study, teach and work.

“Digital Immigrants typically have very little appreciation for these new skills” (Prensky, 2001). This is a weakness to today’s natives as the immigrants show no appreciation for the ever-changing technology status and show no respect to learn the new ways and would rather teach the old ways.

Which in my opinion isn’t going to be beneficial for anyone as students will struggle to understand the language of the digital immigrants, therefore will be unable to learn effectively.

After reading this article it shows different positions portrayed, many people might have different beliefs on how the future should be carried out between natives and immigrants and whether or not you believe it's a myth or reality as everyone has different views.

My own knowledge has helped me understand this article as we see technology being used more through Covid-19 in 2020, everything needed to go online from schooling to ordering food. Use of technology throughout Covid-19, education purposes would have made immigrants learn the new way to teach through technology by having zoom classes, submitting work online.

“people taking to the internet and internet-based services to communicate, interact, and continue with their job responsibilities from home. Internet services have seen rises in usage from 40 % to 100 %, compared to pre-lockdown levels.” (De et al., 2020)

“Usage of the Windows Virtual Desktop service has tripled, Azure usage increased by several million cores in March and meetings in Teams are going up at an exponential rate: from 560 million minutes on March 12 and 900 million on March 16, to 2.7 billion on March 31. Google Meet has 2 billion minutes of usage a day and Skype has 40 million daily users (up by 40% from February to March) with Skype to Skype calling minutes up 220%.” (Branscombe, 2020).

This shows that digitals natives are reality, as technology is evolving more each day which is making more people further develop their knowledge and learning about the use of technology.

Technology is almost running the world, and that is reality. If digital immigrants don't learn now they won’t have any knowledge of what is happening in the future for these ever-evolving things.

(Jerez, 2016)

References

Blankenship, R. (2017). Are Digital Natives Real? Exploring the Myths and Realities of the Digital Native Existence. Iated Digital Library. https://library.iated.org/view/BLANKENSHIP2017ARE.

Branscombe, M., & Riggins, J. (2020). The Network Impact of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic. The New Stack. https://thenewstack.io/the-network-impact-of-the-global-covid-19-pandemic/.

De, R., Pandey, N., & Pal, A. (2020). Impact of digital surge during Covid-19 pandemic: A viewpoint on research and practice. US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7280123/#bib0065.

Ebuyer. (2013). Are You a digital Native?. e Mediahub. https://www.ebuyer.com/blog/2013/12/are-you-a-digital-native/.

Jerez, J. (2016). Technology Runs The World. Medium. https://medium.com/@joeljerez98/technology-runs-the-world-43f8068922af.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, Vol. 5 No. 9. https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf.