Digital+Natives

Are Digital Natives smarter or stupider? Or just cognitively different?

The dawn of the digital age has had a monumental impact on education because it has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for teaching and learning for both students and teachers in the classroom. However, this digital plethora has both negative and positive repercussions for education and has created a huge debate surrounding internet censorship in schools.

Digital Natives are the generation of people who were born after 1980 and have experienced the progressive appearance and sophistication of social digital technologies. Beginning in 1980, internet users have progressed from Usenet groups, to email, to the beginnings of the World Wide Web, to social networks and blogs. Nowadays, as John Pulfrey writes, "most young people in many societies around the world carry mobile devices - cell phones, Sidekicks, iPhones - at all times, and [furthermore] these devices don't just make phone calls; they also send text messages, surf the internet, and download music" (Palfrey, 2008, para. 1). There are conflicting theories as to how growing up with digital technology has effected the minds of Digital Natives. Mark Bauerlein, author of "The dumbest generation" however, is not convinced that Digital Natives are smarter than non-Digital Natives. He firmly believes that "the twenty first century teen, connected and multitasked, autonomous yet peer-mindful, makes no great leap forward in human intelligence, global thinking, and netizen-ship. Young users have learned a thousand new things, no doubt. They upload and download, surf and chat, post and design, but they haven't learned to analyze a complex text, store facts in their heads, comprehend a foreign policy decision, take lessons from history, or spell correctly. Never having recognized their responsibility to the past, they have opened up a fissure in our civic foundations, and it shows in their halting passage into adulthood and citizenship" (as cited in Tapscott, 2008, p. 5). Former professor E.D. Hirsch (2008) laments the fact that statistics show that high school graduates are coming to universities unprepared to take higher level courses and calls undergraduates " brain-dead addicts of iPods and cellphones who lack curiosity and passion for knowledge" (para. 6).

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Author Don Tapscott, however, is a leading proponent of the idea that digital natives are intellectually superior to non-Digital Natives. In his book "Grown up Digital", Tapscott (2008) refers to the period from 1977 to 1997 as the "Net Generation". Tapscott refers to people who were born after 1997 as "Generation X" and the Net Generation people as "Net Geners" instead of Digital Natives (p. 16). Tapscott claims that "by the time Net Generation kids reach their twenties, the typical Net Gener has spent over 20,000 hours on the Internet and over 10,000 hours playing video games of some kind" (p. 100). That means that Net Geners spend about seventeen percent of their lives, or an average of four hours a day, surfing the internet or playing video games.

To be sure, Tapscott agrees that all this time spent on computer has had some adverse effects on Digital Natives. Tapscott (2008) admits that Digital Natives " appear to be disorganized, have poor impulse control, and have difficulty making long term plans" (p. 100). However, according to Tapscott, the benefits that digital technology provides for Digital Natives far outweigh the detriments. media type="custom" key="5246653"

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