Evolutionary post #1!

It’s been interesting to see the digital native versus digital immigrant debate evolve over the last ten years. By virtue of my age, I’m a member of the generation who technically have a foot in each camp – depending on who you ask – and I am particularly interested in seeing where the majority of researchers will place me in five years’ time.

In the meantime, it is equally fascinating to observe the debate around how to best educate those who don’t have this ambiguity surrounding them. Those who are unequivocally digital natives have an understanding of ‘tech’ – not just the internet – that far surpasses that of my contemporaries and me – so how do you teach them? Is it even possible?

In 2012, Wan Ng of UNSW produced a fascinating article entitled ‘Can We Teach Digital Natives Digital Literacy?’ He poses a Venn diagram to consider: the space where socio-emotional literacy, informational literacy and technical literacy overlap is where the nirvana of digital literacy can be found. Theoretically, that means that yes, to an extent - I should be able to teach some form of digital literacy. We teach students how to research, filter and extract information. We teach students how to block code, how to use Raspberry Pi and Arduino, how to code using Java. We teach students how to communicate clearly to different audiences in collaborative documents. We teach them what ‘just playing’ on a device at home does not – how to use technology in an educational setting, which then develops into vocational training. Yes, we teach students to be digitally literate.

But what about us as educators, we who are theoretically native? We aren’t through with our learning journeys yet – how easy is it to teach us? We generally have a pretty good opinion of our own capacity for tech, let’s be honest, but our students are moving quickly to catch up – and there is constant pressure to keep up with the latest trends and apps and programs.

Fortunately, Wan’s research concludes that we are capable of picking up the various forms of digital literacy and embrace it eagerly, which is reassuring. When we see how it all fits together with the wider global context, and how embedded in our daily lives various forms of technology have become, especially for the younger generation with whom we spend so much of our time, it is difficult not to. If we can transfer this attitude to our students we have made a flying leap towards teaching them the core concept of digital literacy – to remain literate requires constant learning.

Or else, I suppose, we risk getting stuck on our tiny part of the world wide web, doomed to wither into irrelevance.

Ng, Wan (2012) Can we teach digital natives digital literacy? in Computers & Education 59 (2012) 1065-1078.