Week 9 - Question 1

1) Find out about 'Digital Immigration'.
What Is it? Who cares about it? What sort of general attitudes have been based upon it?

Before understanding ‘Digital Immigration’ I think it is easier to explain who it involves. A ‘Digital Immigrant’ is a person over the age of 28. Those who were not born into the digital age, but do at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be associated as a ‘Digital Immigrant’. The opposite of a digital immigrant is a ‘Digital Native’, in reality anyone under the age of 28.

Marc Prensky uses the example of the difference between tutors and students ad does
Timothy VanSlyke. There is a general attitude that students are the digital native and the tutors are the digital immigrant, no matter how hard they try and adjust and work into the new digit age. He says ‘our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.’

With this in mind ‘Digital Immigration would appear to be the immigrants using new media but not using it to the full advantage or understanding it properly. Just as illegal immigrants, digital immigrants have a whole new world to adapt to. An online urban dictionary describe a digital immigrant as ‘Somebody who has popped up on an Internet site because of clicking on a link (sometimes accidentally). They don't have the slightest idea where they are at, but read the site information out of curiosity’ which shows an example of a digital immigrant trying to be a digital native. This would also help the identification of digital immigration to be the new age unknown ‘stuff’ for digital immigrants.