By : Zizipho Madibi
Before I discovered the terms “digital natives and digital
immigrants” I was always asking myself how is it that the children born these
days are so much more aware of technology than I am or was at their age. I remember
my 2 year old niece taking selfies, knowing exactly where to go for the camera
to turn on her, I was amazed. When I came across the term “digital natives” I
had an aha moment, my questions were somewhat answered.
The term digital native was coined and popularized by education consultant Marc Prensky in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, in which he relates the contemporary decline in American education to educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students.
This generation of students has not just changed in bits and
pieces such as changing the way they talk, changes in fashion and styles as it
used to be in generations before. A huge disconnection has happened and there
is no going back. Digital natives are different, they read blogs rather than
newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. They
probably don’t even know what a library card looks like, let alone having one;
if they do have one, they probably have never used it.
I am a digital immigrant. I have learned about technology
late in life. Sometimes I wonder how I used to do some things before the advent
of information and communication technologies. Have you ever imagined how life
would be without your smart phone? I cannot, yet I am an immigrant. How much
more for a native, they don’t know any other world except for the digital
world. They were born and raised with technology.
Now
the real question is: are digital immigrants well equipped to serve digital
natives? If not, what should they do to be on par with this generation? That is
another subject for another blog post. Truth is, as librarians today, we are
serving a generation of digital nativity and most of us are digital immigrants,
we have to learn more about the ways they’d rather be taught and adapt to them.
The problem here is not with them but rather with the rest of us, the “digital
immigrants” who remain stubbornly attached to older media, and who are failing
to catch up with the times
