Digital Native ~ Terminology Debate

After an interested meeting of the CoP in Edinburgh on Bonfire Night, I thought I'd share a link or two. Well, it was the day of Bonfire Night, we didn't get together to forgo the fireworks!

We discussed how the term digital native is misleading. There is an assumption digital native denotes an innate understanding of technology and therefore  means all those born within a certain timeframe (and from now on) are highly adept at using technology for all means.

For those that work in libraries and education, we regularly see that this is not the case. JISC and the British Library undertook research into young people's technological abilities and discovered there is no correlation between ability to work technology with information literacy, academic literacy or in some cases digital literacies. They did this with CIBER in a project called Google Generation which really prompted a lot of my personal interest in digital natives.

Prensky, who introduced us to the term digital native cannot be credited, nor berated, for giving us a definition. The current understanding seems to have grown from a collective consciousness of what being digitally native might mean. Notably, it had to be non-digital natives, or digital immigrants, who decided what it was to be digitally native which is perhaps where the misunderstanding came from.

Dave White a researcher at Oxford University, challenged the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants model in Digital Visitors and Residents, abstract below:

This article proposes a continuum of ‘Visitors’ and ‘Residents’ as a replacement for Prensky’s much‐criticised Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Challenging the basic premises upon which Prensky constructed his typology, Visitors and Residents fulfil a similar purpose in mapping individuals’ engagement with the Web. We argue that the metaphors of ‘place’ and ‘tool’ most appropriately represent the use of technology in contemporary society, especially given the advent of social media. The Visitors and Residents continuum accounts for people behaving in different ways when using technology, depending on their motivation and context, without categorising them according to age or background. A wider and more accurate representation of online behaviour is therefore established.

Further information about Dave and his work is available here.  

I don't know how others feel about this debate, though I do wonder what the library of the future will look like, when the only staff it might have were born into a world saturated with technology. Interested to hear the thoughts of others.