Have you ever felt a communication barrier between you and your parents? Have you ever felt that the gap between the two generations is causing most of your fights with them? Do your fights involve the fact that you don't spend time with them as much as you spend on the internet? If you have encountered any of those issues, then this is because of the fact that you are a digital native and your parents are digital immigrants. 

Digital natives is a term that describes the people born into the new technology we are interacting with today. Since they are born into it, they are more flexible and fluent with its usage. Unlike digital immigrants who were born before the advanced technologies, and have to struggle with the process of adapting to it. Even then, it is still impossible for digital immigrants to be as good as the natives when it comes to technology. 

Natives and immigrants are forced to interact and meet on a daily basis, whether it's a conversation with your parents, a debate with your professor, or a discussion with your boss. Those meetings often result in conflicts of ideologies due to the generation gap. Every single day new technologies are introduced in offices, schools, and other facilities. Some digital immigrants reject these advancements and prefer their old-school ways, and some accept them and try to update their minds to fit them. Obviously the ones who reject it face many issues with their digital natives.


This dilemma is prevalent with education systems all over the world.  As Marc Prensky states, "this is the single largest problem facing the digital world as our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". The digital immigrants such as parents are always complaining about their children spending too much time playing video games or just sitting on the computer, but what they can't comprehend is that their entire lives, from experiences to thoughts to pictures, have been basically uploaded on the internet. Marc Prensky suggested that their should be new ways of teaching digital natives, such as computer games that involve learning lessons, in order to get the students to engage and participate in the learning process.

Citation:

"Digital Native." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Feb. 2013. Web. 03 May 2013.