I am a digital native. I honestly think that almost my entire generation is, too. We are digital natives. However, I also think that we are much more complicated than that, because members of my generation were all born in the 80s or late 70s. That experience provides us with a memory that enables us to know of a time before the shift that Prensky (2001) speaks of in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.

That key experience is that we remember. We remember a time before this technological divide, when people read more and watched less. We remember school before there was internet. Those of us who were born before 1985 even remember a domestic or home life before the Internet. We also remember learning to use new technologies right alongside our teachers and parents. As children, many of us shouldered the responsibility of learning and then teaching adults about new technology. And, throughout almost the entirety of our academic experience we have learned from “digital immigrants” as we secretly cultivated an alternative, devious, and – I 

argue - disruptive knowledge of the digital world outside of what we knew as the realm of knowledge. That memory and experience affords us the ability to be translators between today’s digital native and the digital immigrant.


Prensky’s article seems designed to inform an older generation, but his words remind me of how careful I must be when working with my colleagues. I must be as mindful with them as I am with my students; although, this mindfulness must manifest itself in entirely different ways.

As Prensky explains, I need to “go faster” with my students, be less “by the book”, less “step-by-step”, and be open to working more in parallel with myself, my other lessons, and my students. I must stream myself and I must teach my students to surf. I must build a bread crumb trail of hyperlinks that guide different learners through play to similar or complimentary conclusions.