Week 9 Digital Immigrants

Digital immigrants are those who are unnaturally acquainted with the digital world. In comparison particularly in the western culture the more recent generations were born into this digital world as the Internet, video games and up to date technology seems like a second nature to us.' Digital immigrants have had to adapt in order to understand and grasp the digital world.''Our students today are all "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.'' (Mark Prensky) I was intrigued by the theorist Mark Prensky's frequent comparison of digital users with language and accents and thought this was a good way to describe a 'digital immigrant'. The idea of digital technology being understood and used but still unnatural explains the idea rather well.It is often questioned how digital immigrants can be effectively teaching our generation in this area of study as we are seen as the 'digital natives'. The actual concept of digital immigrants suggests that those who fall into this category function differently from us the 'digital natives'.The idea of them being foreign to the digital world can be explored in many examples. An interesting one found online was that a digital immigrant may do something like print an email, edit it on the page and then re enter the word document to edit it again afterwards instead of doing it all at once. Ive found on occasions that older relatives of mine have often opened up another internet explorer instead of just opening a new tab or even closing a window when they want to make a new search.