WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
A while ago on Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed blog there was a post entitled Teaching What We Don’t Know which I commented upon. I questioned the usefulness of the metaphor of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ - just how many young people use technologies as adeptly as we given them credit for? Will then got in touch with me about my response via email:
Great question. Some possible answers:
1. It’s an overstatement made in an attempt to push education in a different direction by people with any number of motivations, real reform, notoriety, financial gain among them.
2. There is truth to the description, but it hasn’t yet played out in every place for every technology.
3. It’s an easy metaphor that captures some of the friction that the technologies are causing.Others?
It’s probably a combination of these, although I’d probably put the emphasis on the first and last ones. The conversation bloomed somewhat via the comment thread, leading to others talking about this issue on their blogs. I’ve been meaning to post about if for a while and, being inspired by Dave Warlick’s pre-conference keynote for the K12 Online Conference, I’ve decided to vodcast my thoughts on this… 
[googlevideo]-1492552075423064251[/googlevideo]
Popularity: 6% [?]
Interesting Doug.
Digital natives. Never mind web 2 bullshit - yes definately invented by intellectuals to define reality. As always, those that define never actually ‘live’ reality. Teenage girls texting in thier pockets - those are native users.
Hi Doug,
Thanks for sending me this via del.icio.us.
I think that it is the ideas of what we can share through web 2.0 that can bring us together as teachers across continents that makes these tools important to me. If I can help students feel this connection, then perhaps I am accomplishing something good beyond any mandated curriculum.
Wait - does this make me the digital native?
Thanks for your comments Quentin and Mark. I’d really like to hear/read/see other people’s opinions about this - please do send a trackback if you discuss this on your blog!