Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants Coursework Paper

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants
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Digital Natives versus Digital Immigrants
Introduction
The term digital native was coined by Mark Prensky in year 2001. He used this idiom in his effort to describe the modern generation of people growing up in the digital era. He further explained that Digital natives are relatively at ease with technology as well as computers than their predecessors at contrastingly early age (Palfrey and Gasser, 2013). This modern era generation highly regards technology as a very important and necessary part of their lives. Children and general teenage generation is generally associated with digital progress and they are therefore considered to be the digital natives because they majorly use computers, texting as well as well as SNS to communicate. If you lag behind, they you are referred to as a digital immigrant and you need to learn the language in order to catch up with the rest of the generation. This paper will discuss the types and aspects of digital natives, challenges facing teachers in teaching modern era generation, benefits and solutions to the challenges of digital native.
The Existence, Aspects and Impacts of Digital Natives for Teaching and Learning
Digital natives received computers and other digital devices in early 90’s and they were more familiar with the technology compared to their counterparts, that is, the immigrants. They had more experienced and familiarity compared to the digital immigrants. According to research, this does not mean that all digital immigrants did not have prior-experience with the device. Some claim that they had some experience with the computers but they were not as effective as the digital natives in handling them. Therefore, there exists digital native, who term technology as part of their lives. This prompts the questions about the aspects that define digital natives from the rest of the generation.
Research was done extensively to untangle the various aspects of digital natives. These efforts were aimed at determining how digital natives act like within the rest of the people in the world. First, research show that age is the clearest variable in explaining digital natives. This is a very self –explanatory variable because when talking about digital natives, it is the first thing that comes in our minds. According to Prensky, generation that qualifies to be called digital natives was born after 1980. Consequently, literature has changed the current category due to the emergence of the web 2.0 and thus creating a second generation of the digital natives (Kennedy et. al., 2010). Therefore, the first generation of digital natives are young adults born between 1983-1990 while the second generation of people with more familiarity with current web 2.0 application were born after 1990.
The aspect of age leads us to our second variable, which entails experience and thus the breadth of use. Breadth of use can be defined as the number of different activities one undertakes online with time while the experience is measured with regards to the years one has been Internet. In as scale of 0-12, which is basically is determine by the activity level,...