IMHO: Children have not changed to adapt to/as a result of the digital landscape. The digital landscape is the ideal environment for children’s natural development. The formative (first 5) years of development have not changed. Children that are not exposed to tv, pcs and Blackberries before they start school don’t fair any worse than those that have. What’s more – we are all capable of thinking and processing information the way the N-Gen/D-Gen do. We just have to give ourselves permission to break a few rules

One last point
* Most teachers have political and financial barriers to overcome before they can embrace the teaching methodologies Prensky discusses – adapting methodologies to technologies takes time and money. Labeling teachers as ‘Digital Migrants’ that need to “just do it” seems a little unfair.
* It all comes down to Exposure/Opportunity and Interest/Need

Sorry, realise that sentence doesn’t make sense with the last two words missing.

Categorisation does help with assessing the needs of students and how to respond to them. There is a danger that they are then labelled as that and the possibility that they may change, or that the categories are immutable. It’s the difference between using categories to inform investigation, or using them to preclude further investigation (as people tend to do with learning styles and personality inventories, as if these don’t change for individuals day-by-day or subject-to-subject).

And observations do sometimes indicate people _are_ falling into two categories when we teach them. I’ve observed teaching people using immersive virtual worlds that there really do seem to be two distinct categories – those who “get it”, who engage and say they learn from the experience, and those who don’t and say they don’t learn. What underpins (or underlies) that difference, I can’t say yet – when I can I’ll know I’m ready to submit my thesis.

The problem with the digital immigrants / natives is that it implies too much of a polarity, with people all on one side and similar to each other, and everyone else in another. Also, it’s not purely determined by age. I’ve met plenty of students (in a minority though, and becoming a smaller minority every year) who aren’t comfortable with technology and who prefer not to use it. Similarly, I see people my age who are highly proficient and don’t seem to have an analogue accent.

I think the metaphor does have its merits though. However, I think we are all immigrants, we are by nature analogue beings, but we choose to move in to the digital world to different degrees and with different capabilities. Starting younger does help to some extent in shaping attitudes perhaps, but this is more like the children of ex-patriates taking to the culture around them; some do, some don’t.

I usually use the metaphor but refer to it as degrees of naturalisation. That then gives me a continuum to refer to, without assuming which side of a divide people belong to.

The place the analogy breaks down is that the pace of technological change will quickly render all these natives immigrants in their own turn. Ultimately, for the forseeable future, all adults will be immigrants.

N/I distinguishes people’s comfort w/ technology. Most likely there is a lot of overlap between the Revolutionaries and the Natives, but the two terms are not synonymous. I think the problem a lot of people have with the N/I description is that they assume that all younger people are Natives, and all older people are Immigrants, while from my experience this is most definitely not true. I teach at a community college, and I find all different levels of comfort among both faculty of various ages, and among my students.

Further, the dependence or at least focus by the natives/immigrants distinction on the age of users is incorrect as well. A user’s need or ability to adapt to new technology isn’t as dependent on age as the popular interpretations of millenials, natives, or net-generation suggest.

@sarah
Revolutionary/beneficiary may be a useful perspective to consider, but I don’t think it’s analogous to native/immigrant. R/B focuses on the differences between the developers and users of a technology rather than the differences between the need and ability of different users to adapt to a technology.

For me, the differences among users in their need, ability or desire to adapt to and use new technologies is still better described by Rogers’ early adopters to laggards.

-Chris