I’ve been thinking for a while that the connection between John Perry Barlow and Marc Prensky re: the mythical “digital native” is underexplored, and this morning, I finally started a folder for a new writing project.
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I am in my late 30s. “Digital native” was first used for my age cohort in the early 2000s—and was riffing off of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” It is a USELESS term because its frame of reference keeps shifting to “kids these days” (and other reasons, too).
Prensky coined the term “digital native” to talk about people my age, but I have a colleague younger than me who is using the term to refer to our undergraduate students. This sums up so much of why I think this term is useless.
Je viens d’entendre à la RTS une définition des « digital natives » comme la génération Z. On a commencé à employer cette phrase aux années 2000 pour décrire ma génération, et son usage continu pour signifier « les jeunes d’aujourd’hui » révèle combien elle est inutile.
You know, I think the combination of research training in ed tech and currently teaching ICT classes makes me particularly critical of the “digital native” idea.
Just had a student explain that such-and-such a file wasn’t in a specific folder, it was just on their computer, in case anyone was wondering how digital native rhetoric is holding up. Need to bookmark that 2021 article from The Verge.
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