As a follow-up to yesterday's blog on Prensky's "digital natives-digital immigrants" categorizations, this blog extends the issue one step further. Jenkins (2007) says that “digital natives” implies all students share a common body of technology knowledge that they have all mastered. In fact, the term masks their different degrees of access to and comfort with the emerging technologies. Also, rather than focusing on the inadequacies of the “digital immigrants,” he argues we should recognize what they bring with them from the old world which is still valuable. Actually, a significant percentage of professionals working in Silicon Valley are “immigrants” who can probably out-compute most of the “natives.” Prensky’s digital and cultural divide between these groups also short circuits thinking about meaningful collaborations across these generations.
Another problem with Prensky’s “digital native” characterization is that it is not typical of all students. There is a digital divide or participation gap within the U.S. For example, Sax, Ceja, and Terenishi (2001) conducted a study 272,821 freshman and found that, after controlling for income, Afro-Americans and Latinos were less lightly to communicate via e-mail than Whites and Asian-Americans. People with lower incomes have lower rates of Internet use and broadband access (Horrigan, 2006; Horrigan & Rainie, 2005). Finally, students with higher incomes are more lightly to use computers to conduct research, create projects, and analyze data than students with lower incomes (Junco & Mastrodicasa, 2007).
Tomorrow, we'll examine the digital divide internationally. See you there.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
No comments:
Post a Comment