Smoke Signals of the Digital Natives Who are the Digital Natives and How do They Communicate with Each Other and the World?

Or to put it simply, everything you know has changed!!! The World is Digital Through the use of the Internet, mobile phones, and other hand-held devices, people are accessing and processing information in ways that challenge the historic business models that have held sway for decades, and are at the same time raising fundamental questions about the future of information dissemination and human interaction. Or to put it simply, everything you know has changed!!!

Three Undeniable Truths Change is inevitable. Undeniable Truth #2 Who we are as adults, is as a result of the sum of our childhood experiences, and these experiences, whether we acknowledge it or not, guide our biases and desires throughout our entire adult life. Undeniable Truth #3 Most people resist change.

Who Are The Digital Natives? Digital Natives are native speakers of technology, fluent in the digital language of computers, mobile phones, video games, and the Internet. Born into the digital world. They increasingly shun traditional media and cocoon themselves in digital media which becomes their primary channels for information and remote human interaction. Digital Natives, as a collective, don’t just act differently, they think differently.

Camera Or Digital Camera What is this?

Who Are The Digital Immigrants? Digital immigrants are those people who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in their lives, either from a professional or personal perspective, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new digital technology. There must be a 3rd group not identified; the group of people for whom these Internet-based technologies have no impact at all, the digital aliens?

Digital Native vs Digital Immigrant There is much controversy over this. How does an age make you digitally proficient?

Lifestyle Not Choice Being a digital native is a lifestyle not a choice that you make. Digital natives communicate with other digital natives in ways that they have in common with each other. Necessity being the mother of invention means that digital natives will create new ways to enhance their lifestyle. Which makes digital natives the drivers of revolutionary innovation.

Digital Natives... ...are always on-line, multitasking...non-linear access to information ...communicate in a grid-like network with disregard to location, distance, time, and ethnicity... …highly networked, interactive and social ...prefer to get information from sounds and video than text... ...use many different interfaces to communicate... ...generate not just absorb content... ...collaborate instinctively... ....verify information immediately... ....thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards...

Talking To Digital Natives Digital natives use various means to communicate and receive information, including: Blogs, Social Networks, Instant Messaging, RSS Feeds, Discussion Forums Videos, Video Games, Virtual Worlds, Video Conferencing They do this, predominantly, using mobile phones and computers, via Internet What tool do you use everyday that is missing from the list?

Natives vs Immigrants Digital natives Like receiving information quickly from multiple media sources. Like parallel processing and multi-tasking. Like processing pictures, sounds and video before text. Like random access to hyperlinked multimedia information. Like to network with others. Like to learn “just in time”. Digital immigrants Like slow and controlled release of information from limited sources. Like singular processing and single or limited tasking. Like processing text before pictures, sounds and video. Like to receive information linearly, logically and sequentially. Like to work independently. Like to learn “just in case”.

Digital Natives generally have a much better idea of what the future is bringing than we do. They're already busy adopting new systems for communicating (instant messaging), sharing (blogs), buying and selling (eBay), exchanging (peer-to-peer technology), creating (Flash), meeting (3D worlds), collecting (downloads), coordinating (wikis), evaluating (reputation systems), searching (Google), analyzing (SETI), reporting (camera phones), programming (modding), socializing (chat rooms), and even learning (Web surfing). http://www.ascd.org/authors/ed_lead/el200512_prensky.html

Lifestyle Not Profit Digital Immigrants innovate for a profit motive. Digital Natives innovate to enhance their lifestyles. They live by the WWW(World Wide Web) meaning: Whatever Whenever Where ever ….to enhance their life.

What to do today? Create a process that can harness digital natives creativity. Google allows employees 20% of their time on personal projects of their own choosing. Most of Google's current products were initially personal projects. Create digital native mentoring programs with digital immigrants as mentors. There are no bad children just bad parents!

One Last Thing Fact: Today's digital natives are tomorrows digital immigrants. Hint: Do you really believe that flash drives will be the predominate way of moving data in 20 years.

Good article http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_247.html http://www.openeducation.net/2008/07/14/of- digital-immigrants-power-browsing-and- bouncing-out/ http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/ women/families/article4295414.ece http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native Go to this site to download a good presentation http://orenotes.blogspot.com/2008/05/digital- natives-vs-digital-immigrants.html