Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies
Delbert S. Elliott · ELT Journal · 2013
A good metaphor can be very seductive. By applying familiar frameworks and terminology to abstract and difficult concepts, we can more easily make sense of them. However, there is a danger that the metaphor will begin to affect our understanding of the underlying theories—that the vehicle will overtake the tenor—and that we will alter, adjust, or somehow twist our ideas in order to fit them in to metaphor we have constructed. The simplification of challenging ideas is both a strength and a weakness of metaphor. When Marc Prensky first coined the term ‘digital native’ (and its corollary ‘digital immigrant’) in 2001, the analogy seemed apposite. Rapid advances in technology seemed to have widened the generation gap. Kids were thinking differently, learning differently, and according to Prensky, they were even wired differently. Thus the idea of a digital landscape populated by ‘natives’, who understood the culture perfectly and innately, and ‘immigrants’, who would always have an accent, took hold. Educators and educational institutions needed to change to meet the needs of a generation quite unlike any that had gone before. In 2001, Google was just a couple of years old, Wikipedia had just launched, and YouTube and Facebook did not exist. With that in mind, in the ten years between the publication of Prensky’s original article and this collection, one might expect the trend to have become even more pronounced. However, the message that reoccurs throughout this book, from writers and researchers working in a variety of contexts across the world, is that things are not as straightforward as they may have first appeared.