Digital Natives and the Wired Generation
Digital Natives and the Wired Generation
The term
Marc Prensky (2001): people immersed in technology since birth are “digital natives”; those who came to it later are “digital immigrants.”
The behaviour
Online time measured in hours per day, not per week. On many campuses most students use social networks routinely, for entertainment and for study.
The mindset
To a digital native, technology is not a separate tool. It is how they find information, talk, relax, and connect.
The caveat
Being young does not guarantee skilled or critical use. The strict native/immigrant divide is contested.
Many students now arrive at school having never known a world without connected screens. They reach a phone before a pencil, and much of how they find information, talk to friends, and spend free time already runs through a device. That habit is the raw material a teacher can either fight or use.
Where the Term Comes From
The education writer Marc Prensky introduced the phrase digital natives in a 2001 essay to describe people who grew up surrounded by computers, phones, and the internet. He paired it with digital immigrants: those who adopted these tools later in life and often keep an “accent,” such as printing an email to read it. The idea caught on because it named something teachers could see in front of them.
Marc Prensky, in a 2001 essay.
It describes people immersed in technology since birth. He contrasted them with “digital immigrants,” who adopted these tools later and often carry habits from a pre-digital life.
A Generation Measured in Hours Online
The data cited for this group is striking, even allowing for its age. In figures from the mid-2010s, close to 95 percent of college students used the internet at least once a month, and their time online was counted in hours per day rather than per week. On many campuses, more than 80 percent used social networking sites regularly.
That time is not spent only on entertainment. A large share of it goes to academic and intellectual work: reading, group projects, and sessions with people in other places. The opening for a teacher sits in that second category. Treat these numbers as dated benchmarks that show a direction, not current fact.
The practical question is how a lesson can claim even a small slice of those hours for learning, rather than pretending the hours are not there.
Not a Tool, a Way of Living
For a digital immigrant, technology is a tool picked up to do a job and put down afterward. For a digital native it is closer to an environment. They rely on the web for information, communication, entertainment, and for staying connected to people regardless of distance. Very young children already handle phones with a confidence that looks built in.
This is why simply adding a device to an old lesson rarely lands. If the gadget will enter the room anyway, and it usually will, the useful stance for a teacher is to be comfortable with it rather than afraid of it, and to design work that runs through it.
They treat it as an environment, not an instrument.
Information, conversation, entertainment, and connection all pass through it by default, so a device switched off for a lesson feels to them like a part of life switched off.
The Divide Is Not Absolute
The native and immigrant labels are useful shorthand, but they are contested, and it helps to hold them loosely.
Treating every young person as an expert can be as unhelpful as treating every older teacher as helpless. The safer read is that most students are comfortable with devices and reachable through them, while the deeper skills of judgment and creation still have to be taught.
The takeaway is not to drop the idea but to use it carefully: assume comfort, plan for gaps, and teach the critical skills that comfort alone does not supply.
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