Digital native

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. His article posited that "the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had changed the way students think and process information, making it difficult for them to excel academically using the outdated teaching methods of the day. In other words, children raised in a digital, media-saturated world, require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention, and Prensky dubbed these children "digital natives". Contextually, his ideas were introduced after a decade of worry over increased diagnosis of children with ADD and ADHD, which itself turned out to be largely overblown. Prensky did not strictly define the digital native in his 2001 article, but it was later, arbitrarily, applied to children born after 1980, because computer bulletin board systems and Usenet were already in use at the time. The idea became popular among educators and parents, whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a digital native, and has since been embraced as an effective marketing tool. It is important to note that Prensky's original paper was not a scientific one, and that no empirical data exists to support his claims. He has since abandoned his digital native metaphor in favor of digital wisdom. More recently, the Digital Visitor and Resident idea has been proposed as an alternative to understanding the various ways individuals engage with digital technology.

Globally, 30 percent of the population born between 1988 and 1998 has used the Internet for over five years as of 2013.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Marc Prensky defines the term "digital native" and applies it to a new group of students enrolling in educational establishments referring to the young generation as "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, videos, video games, social media and other sites on the internet. People who were "born digital", first appeared in a series of presentations by Josh Spear beginning in May 2007. A Digital Native research project is being run jointly by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. A collaborative research project is being run by Hivos, Netherlands and the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. The Net Generation Encountering e-learning at university project funded by the UK research councils was completed in March 2010. More recently the Museum of Social Media, launched in 2012, has included an exhibit on "Digital Natives & Friends."

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