A number of the ideas that people use to make sense of the world and try to formulate what we ought to be doing, make recommendations, set up their own lives, engage with others, are essentially fictions or myths.
And I’d like to talk about one of them in particular today that I’ve encountered, now going back at least 20 years in my work as an educator. I’m sure many of you have heard these terms thrown around for about that same amount of time. And the term, and the concept, is that of “digital native.”
Usually this is tied in with a generational sort of differentiation where those of us who, for example, grew up in Generation X without the internet, without all these websites, without mobile technology would be digital immigrants, as would definitely be the baby boomers.
And then the millennials were supposed to be digital natives. And then, the next generation coming up under them, the current generation in college, Generation Z or Zoomers, whatever you want to call them, are also supposed to be digital natives.
On its face, it seems like a plausible idea. Those who, as children, are being introduced to and engaging with a new technology should be a bit more savvy in using it. It should feel more intuitive to them than to people who are older adults who are engaging with it without having had the benefit of childhood.
Sort of like people will try to say, you know, the time for learning languages is when you’re a child. By the time that you’re an adult, your brain has become too fixed and ossified to easily learn languages, which turns out to be a good bit of nonsense, and perhaps, I won’t say wishful thinking, because it’s actually a kind of pessimistic thinking, but maybe wishful thinking for the experts who then get to play at being experts about that and use it as an excuse for why they don’t know languages that well
So coming back to technology, and in particular, the technologies that are associated with the internet and with phones, you know, mobile technology and all of those sorts of matter, what was being said roughly 20 years ago, maybe a little bit even further back by the so-called pedagogical experts, was that we now needed to take into account, in addition to all the other sorts of divides, like the difference between male and female students or difference between races or any other sort of background thing like that.
We also needed to take into stock when we were designing our classes and assessment measures and even thinking about what technology we were going to apply and use, whether in the classroom or in our course management systems outside of the classroom. We needed to take into account this new divide between a sort of have and have not.
Those who have a normal facility and perhaps greater insights into the newer technology and those of us who have to struggle with it, who don’t have the habits already baked or built in like these younger people do.
I remember one particular incident that really drove it home to me, the mindset that is involved in this. So it was a pedagogy and professional development conference. And I think the session that I was in wasn’t even really about digital divides and digital natives versus digital immigrants or any of that sort of stuff. But the presenters ended up introducing that distinction. And then there were a bunch of other people in the session who in the Q&A and response part were really hammering this point home.
I looked around and I noticed the demographic disparities involved in this. So this is when I was quite young as a professor. I’d been teaching probably about... 10 years at that point. So I was in my early 40s, out of graduate school, having a good bit of experience under my belt as a Generation X instructor.
And the people who were leading the workshop and carrying out most of the conversation and seemed very, very committed to this notion of digital native versus digital immigrant divide were all boomers. I’m not going to say that all boomers are the stereotypical boomer or anything like that, but these actually were.
They had all the wisdom that they were going to share with us younger professors who should be taking our cues from them. about how we should be dealing with yet another generation younger than us, our millennial students. And so boomers were portraying themselves as the ones who, they were part of one big “we”: them, the bosses, we, the underlings. And we were the digital immigrants who needed to be sensitive to and structure everything around the other generation of digital natives.
I noticed that there were a few older millennials in there and they were seemingly a little bit uncomfortable. And there were a lot of people my age as well. And they were some of them just kind of keeping their heads down. None of them really wanting to raise the issue, which is that this whole digital native thing is kind of BS.
Yeah. Now, why do I say that? Well, because our actual experience in the classroom, many of us using technology in ways that these educational experts were often not knowing about and perhaps not even suspecting that we might be doing, we knew that we instructors actually understood the technology and could use it more readily in than the supposed digital natives, not least because we actually had to be fairly conscious about what we were doing.
And so we could raise an issue here about deliberate and conscious use of a technology and more intuitive use, and say that sometimes you’re actually better off thinking about what you’re doing rather than just responding in a gut way.
But it went really far beyond that. What I noticed in my classes were that despite having cell phones, despite having grown up in an environment that included the internet and being on computers, most of my students really did not know how to use them effectively, even when it came to things like doing searches for information using a search engine, by that time almost completely Google, or writing papers and formatting them easily and up to standards in a word processing program, or how to effectively send emails. And that’s a very, very basic technology.
A lot of them knew on a very surface level how to do these sorts of things, but didn’t really understand once things got tricky, what they should do next. or how to find information that would be useful for them, or any of the limitations of the technology that they were using. If they were indeed natives, they were natives who didn’t understand their own supposed special environment, as well as the people who came in from the outside, we might say, temporally.
And so this entire narrative or dichotomy, or whatever you want to have it, ideology perhaps, of digital natives and digital immigrants who are very different, almost like dogs and cats to each other, or you know how “men are from Mars and women are from Venus. This all collapses when you look at it carefully.
And I still see people making a lot of reference to it today. But indeed, it tends to still be boomers who are saying those sorts of things, and not people in Generation X, who perhaps had a better vantage point since we had a lot. more technology that we grew up with, but it was technology that we had to master.
It wasn’t quite so easy to use when you got a computer. First you actually, back in the day, had to learn how to use an operating system like DOS or some other thing to program what you wanted. And then eventually, you know, we get all of the mouse and point and click and windows and pick whatever else you want to talk about.
And things in some respects get easier, but also get harder to really know precisely what you’re doing with. I’m not going to say that younger people per se don’t know what they’re doing. But many of them don’t seem to be, if they are digital natives, natives who know more than just a city block of their environment. And that’s a big problem when we want to make these generalizations.
So it’s something I’ve been thinking about today. I thought it might be interesting for people, to talk about and think about, and perhaps compare their own experiences or their own assumptions about this contested term.
I will actually close this out by throwing out a modest proposal, which is actually quite a radical one when you’re not just calling it “modest”, which is that we should retire this term. It turns out to be pretty useless for picking out any sort of reality that would help us in figuring out policy or education or anything that really matters to us.
Should we replace it with another term? Only if we’re going to make the concept better, fuller, more flexible than it currently stands. It’s really more of a mistake waiting to happen than anything else.
