Reconsidering Digital Natives and Digital Immigrant in the Schools

Abstract

There is now an obvious gap of generations in our education system, purported by the proponents of the ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’ resulting in an imbalance of ICT and technology use, skills, preferences, and experience. Teachers are digital immigrants while students are digital natives, the latter being more ICT savvy than the former, hence the integration of technology into teaching and learning remains a challenge for many teachers. Recently, however, researchers have long argued that there are differences between the groups of digital natives and digital immigrants. This conceptual paper attempts to illustrate the current literature on the growing interest in digital natives and digital immigrants in the education system.