The Seminar
Oxford’s Discovery Seminars are seminars designed for first-semester undergraduates that introduce them to ways of knowing and producing knowledge within a discipline or field of study. The seminars are part of Oxford’s Ways of Inquiry program and use inquiry-based learning to cultivate students’ abilities to ask and answer meaningful questions, examine evidence more rigorously, and use evidence more effectively.
The APDH contains transcripts and photographs of a series of interviews conducted in Gwendolynne Reid’s fall 2018 Discovery Seminar on “Digital Natives and Digital Literacies.” The seminar was organized around inquiry on Marc Prensky’s metaphors of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” and whether these metaphors are truly useful for helping us think about generational relationships with digital technologies. Students also engaged in inquiry on the digital literacies necessary to thrive in contemporary media environments. Part of the semester’s inquiry included device-based oral history interviews on five dimensions of participants’ usage and digital histories: (1) activities, (2) people, (3) places, and (4) media, and (5) learning/history. Students each conducted one interview with someone of their generation and someone of an older generation. Students then engaged in their own inquiry using the archive, developing their own questions based on our reading and research together and using inductive content analysis to shed light on their questions.
A Popular Metaphor
The metaphors “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” are widely attributed to Marc Prensky’s partnered 2001 articles in On the Horizon. In his first article, Prensky made the claim that digital natives “think and process information fundamentally differently” from “digital immigrants,” who are fated to “retain, to some degree, their ‘accent’” in digital environments (p. 1; p. 3). The assumption that digital natives think differently and are more competent users of digital media has been compelling to public and professional audiences alike, leading to calls for new approaches to teaching and learning. Chris Dede (2005), for example, recommends that “higher education institutions can prosper by using these emerging technologies to deliver instruction matched to the increasingly ‘neomillennial’ learning styles of their students” (p. 7).
Google’s n-gram viewer, a tool that charts frequencies of lexical strings in its database of books from 1500 to 2008, provides some perspective on the persuasiveness and popularity of the phrases “digital native” and “digital immigrant” between 2000 and 2008, with a steep rise in usage for “digital native” in particular. Clearly, many found Prensky’s metaphor compelling for thinking about the differences between those growing up with routine access to digital technologies and those growing up before this access.
Google Trends, a tool that charts search queries in Google’s search engine more widely, provides perspective on the continued popularity of the term since 2008. A search for worldwide queries for “digital natives” between January 2008 and January 2019 demonstrates a continued increase for searches between 2008 and 2011, with a slight decline since then. The term, however, continues to be used worldwide.
Google Scholar citations data also confirm that the term continues to be used in scholarship across a range of fields. As of January 2019, a search for “digital natives” yields 50,100 results in the scholarship Google has archived in its database. A search limited to 2015 – 2019 yields 18,200 results. Similarly, a search for “digital immigrants” yields 29,600 results with 11,300 results since 2015.
These queries are only broadly indicative of trends, however, since they shed no light on how these terms were used, with an increasing body of scholarship critical of the terms. A number of empirical studies have called the metaphor’s built-in assumptions about generational learning of digital literacies into question, finding, for example, that students often have limited understandings of the tools they use routinely and of other digital tools they could use to support activities such as learning (Margaryan, Littlejohn, & Vojt, 2011). Kennedy and Judd (2011) similarly find that digital natives’ research strategies are marked by a “satisficing” approach associated with surface learners focused primarily on passing courses and that they require more support from faculty to develop the literacies necessary for deeper learning and academic inquiry (p. 132).
A number of scholars, such as several in Michael Thomas’s 2011 collection Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology, and the New Literacies have called the concept into question as a problematic form of generational determinism that renders the diversity within generations invisible. The collection purposefully includes international perspectives on generational experiences with digital media as way to engage directly with this diversity and work against the metaphor’s flattening effect on the questions we ask about young people’s experiences with digital technologies. A number of scholars have also called the metaphor into question for its technological determinism, the idea that technologies and technology use determine their use and effect on individuals and society. Similarly, the metaphor has been critiqued for its oversimplified assumptions about learning and cognition.
Beyond oversimplification of the complex factors and processes at play in digital technology use in society, other scholars have also pointed out the “othering” effect of the metaphor and the ethical problems with using terms like “native” and “immigrant” that are associated with injustices such as colonialism, apartheid, and xenophobia (Brown & Czerniewicz, 2010, p. 359).
While the seminar was designed to complicate these terms and concepts for students through their own inquiry, the resulting archive is intended as a resource that can lend nuance to discussions of about generational relationships with digital technologies and related practical discussions of how to teach and design for those who have grown up with everyday access to digital technologies.
References
Brown, C., & Czerniewicz, L. (2010). Debunking the ‘digital native’: beyond digital apartheid, towards digital democracy. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5), 357–369.
Dede, C. (2005). Planning for neomillennial learning styles. Educause Quarterly, 28(1), 7–12.
Kennedy, G. E., & Judd, T. S. (2011). Beyond Google and the “satisficing” searching of digital natives. In M. Thomas (Ed.), Deconstructing digital natives: Young people, technology, and the new literacies (pp. 119–136). New York: Routledge.
Margaryan, A., Littlejohn, A., & Vojt, G. (2011). Are digital natives a myth or reality? University students’ use of digital technologies. Computers & Education, 56(2), 429–440.
Prensky, M. (2001a). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part 1. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6.
Prensky, M. (2001b). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part 2: Do they really think differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 1–6.
Thomas, M. (2011). Deconstructing digital natives: Young people, technology, and the new literacies. New York: Routledge.