Yes

Digital native and digital immigrant are catchy phrases, no doubt. The slogans capture the ease with which young people accept technology that baffles many adults. But the observation that children appear more comfortable with digital devices offers little insight into how computing can actually transform the learning process. Catchy phrases should never be confused with guiding principles for education.

If the intent behind the cliché was to inspire adults to develop new fluencies and respect the competence of young people, the result has been the opposite. These terms imply a generational divide that has resulted in educators throwing in the towel.

Calling students digital natives is an excuse for not teaching them about technology. Kids may be less afraid of technology, but this doesn’t translate to intellectual curiosity or comprehending boundaries.

Young people still need teachers and parents to guide them to use these tools wisely and purposefully. Teachers can challenge students by creating experiences with substance and meaning. Parents can model values through words and actions. If adults walk away from our responsibility to teach young people about appropriate, thoughtful uses of technology, it’s our fault when silly or inappropriate uses fill that vacuum.

And we should go further than just helping young people use technology. They need to know why adults think it’s important, and they need to be partners in the process. By giving students a role in decision making about using technology in education, we empower them to think beyond their own enjoyment of the moment. By sharing the “whys” of educational technology with them, we gain powerful allies and advocates in the effort to improve education.

Being a digital immigrant is also a convenient excuse for teachers who don’t want to learn something new. It implies that adults will never “get” technology the way kids do because their brains are wired differently, something that has never been scientifically proven. There is no doubt that the hidden message of being labeled a digital immigrant is that, no matter how good you are with technology, you will always “speak with an accent” and your brain is out of whack with the modern world—so why even try? I have all the sympathy in the world for teachers who are overburdened and who have learned to ignore all the hype that never pans out. But it’s 2011—c’mon people, no more excuses!

Educating today’s students means teaching them how to use computers. No one is saying that the fundamentals aren’t still important—that critical thinking and reading and math aren’t required to succeed in today’s world. But technology makes those things accessible to students who might have been left behind before. Blogs give shy students a voice in a class discussion or allow a student who is not even physically in the classroom to participate. Wikis represent the technology of democracy and everything we try to teach students about collaboration and teamwork. Getting these tools up and running is important; challenging students to use them wisely even more so.

Labels only solidify boundaries and imply that teachers and students are adversaries. It’s simply the wrong model for a collaborative learning environment, where both teachers and students are fellow lifelong learners.

—Sylvia Martinez is president of Generation YES (http://genyes.org), a nonprofit that evangelizes for student involvement in education reform through technology integration and service learning.

No

It makes little sense to debate whether the digital native is a myth, because it exists only as a metaphor and a definition (meaning someone who was born in the digital age). To dismiss the term as merely a catchy phrase, however, is to deny the enormous power it has had to help huge numbers of people understand an important part of 21st century reality. For me, the metaphor has never been—as some have tried to make it—about capabilities or knowledge about all things digital. No matter who you are, you have to learn those things. The distinction is much more about culture. It is about younger people’s comfort with digital technology; their belief that it is easy, useful, and benign; and their view of it as a fun “partner” they can master without much effort, if they choose to (they don’t always).

Because they have grown up with digital technology, digital natives are more comfortable with it than the generations that did not. But this doesn’t mean they know everything about it or want to. A nonintuitive file system that dates back to the earliest days of computing may be of little interest to them.

In World War II, one of the ways the U.S. military tried to ferret out possible spies was to ask them cultural questions that anyone who grew up in the United States should know, but that foreigners, no matter how much they studied, probably would not. Digital natives have that same kind of “growing up with it” knowledge. It is not so much knowing facts about hardware or software as it is having had so many experiences at a formative age with digital devices and interfaces that their use seems to come naturally and intuitively. While many adults have a high level of digital comfort, there are almost always things most young people know and can do easily that older people can’t. For example, I know far more about technology than my 6-year-old son (I hope), but he often shows me tricks or shortcuts he has figured out that I have not.

Obviously, not every child has grown up in the same digital culture. But more and more of the developed world’s kids have game consoles (more than 90% of U.S. households with kids have them), cell phones, and other devices, or have friends who do. And these devices are spreading quickly to the rest of the world too. If we are smart, we will use this to our, and our students’, educational advantage.

One criticism leveled at the digital native/digital immigrant metaphor, however, has some validity. Some people use the categorization to justify continued division and their own inaction rather than the coming together and mutual learning I hoped it would support. Whenever an adult asserts, “I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never speak your language or understand you, so why should I even try?” or a young person says, “I’m a native, so you’ll never understand me,” that is a dangerous misuse of the metaphor that I firmly oppose. When the
description becomes a proscription, we are on the wrong path.

Of course, the very concept of digital natives and digital immigrants has a limited shelf life. The time will soon come, even in less-developed countries, when all will have been born in the digital age, and we will take digital technology as much for granted as we do electricity (although even that, sadly, is not yet completely universal). That is why it is important not to dwell too much on the digital native/digital immigrant distinction, but to instead think ahead to new ideas, such as “digital wisdom.” You can read my thoughts on this at http://tinyurl.com/yjodyfu.

—Marc Prensky is a speaker, writer, consultant, game designer, and author credited with coining the term digital native. This response is adapted from Chapter 2 of Deconstructing Digital Natives, which was published earlier this year. Read more at www.marcprensky.com.

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