Prensky's "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"

 Two things to reflect on:

• According to Prensky, what is the immigrant/native divide, and how has it affected how students learn?

        Marc Prensky is an American writer and speaker on education. In Prensky's article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, he discusses the immigrant/native divide and how that divide has impacted students' learning. In his article, Prensky uses the phrases "Digital Native", meaning those of us who grew up with technology and understand it as a whole and "Digital Immigrant" meaning people who adapted to the digital world and adopted some or all aspects of the digital world without being born into it. Going off of this, when referring to an immigrant/native divide, Prensky is referring to the boundary between the digital native and the digital immigrant. When comparing the digital immigrants with digital natives there is a large divide in how one thinks, and uses the resources provided in order to learn effectively. This divide is based on what Prensky would say is "speaking different languages", the "modern" language of a smooth use of digital media such as editing things online and the "old" language such as printing and editing things on paper. This goes to affect learning because digital immigrants, that we know now as teachers and adults we look up to are trying to teach digital natives the "old" language that they now rather than letting students explore the "modern" language.

• According to Prensky, what category do I fall into, and how has it affected my learning?

    According to Prensky I fall into the category of digital natives. I was born in 2002 and grew up with the modern technologies. This allowed me to grow up speaking the language of the digital world and understand it but it also made it so I was growing up and being taught by people who fall into the category of digital immigrants. This meant that I was speaking the digital language but limited to what my teachers could do with it. Outside of school I was multitasking and using as many resources as I could while inside school, I was doing single tasks with limited resources making it harder to expand my knowledge in school and other places of learning. This is just one way in which my learning was impacted by this divide and how my learning was affected by being a digital native. 

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