What is Digital Immigration?

When searching this topic in various areas, I found that the main person that kept coming up with valid ideas was Marc Prensky. His ideas split Digital Immigration and also concentrate on Digital Natives. His ideas about Digital Natives reveals that they "are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked" (http://www.wisc.edu/depd/html/TSarticles/Digital%20Natives.htm). In otherwords, people who were born in this digital age (i.e me and other students) are classed as digital natives. We have been brought up around this technology and the internet is our first port of call and can become something that we greatly rely upon.

Therefore this description of Digital Natives can help us describe what can be classed as a Digital Immigrant. In terms of Marc Prensky he believes that digital immigrants have had to learn and adapt to this new age of technology. They wer'nt born into a society where the internet was already advanced. Therefore many have had to change their ways which can be very difficult for some. A good example to show this is one that Marc Prensky has used himself. He bleieves that even if digital immigrants learn how to keep up with this digital advance with the interent, they may still have a "digital immigrant accent" where digital immigrants turn to the internet as a second source of information and they would rather edit a hard copy of a document than editing it while it is still on the comupter.

Once I had read Prensky's ideas it put this idea of Digital Immigration/native into context and I understood totally what it was all about. I know from experience that I regularly have to describe how the internet works to my mum which can get very annoying when I think it is something really simple but to her it obviously isnt. This has made me understand why she doesnt necessarily know as much as me when it comes to ICT!

Some people believe that because these Digital Natives concentrate solely, in part, on the internet they are not getting full use out of other sources such as books, journals and actually asking for peoples opinions face-to-face. Therefore as not all of the internet can be trustworthy then this causes a problem of digital learning within our society today which many academic peers have become wary of.