Digitized Education: Examining the Challenges of Digital Immigrant Educators in the Face of Net Generation Learners

Abstract

There is no doubt that our society has been digitized. The newest waves of technological advances have taken grips of almost all aspects of our activities in the present times. The education sector is not exempted from the current scenario. Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) acknowledged that technology is advancing at such a rate that traditional ways of teaching and learning are now pushing students and teachers to their full potential. The education sector has gone digital with net generation learners considered to be technologically know-how and computer literate in view of their lifelong exposure to ever-present technology. Digital education requires digital teachers and learners (students), who have the capacity to manipulate digital technologies in teaching-learning situations. Prensky (2001) alleged that our students have changed radically as today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach, and students today are all “native speakers†of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet. It is on this premise that this paper attempts to study how the integration of these technological advances in the education industry have impacted on digital immigrant teachers. One of the goals of this paper is to discuss basic concepts related to the original work of Prensky in 2001 as well as other contributors to his idea. The paper further sheds some light on the challenges faced by the digital immigrant teachers in coping with digital native learning styles in the light of continuous technological developments. The study as well enumerated the characteristics of both digital immigrant teachers and the digital natives (net generation learners), and equally examined the learning preferences of the net generation students and how they learn. Finally, the authors recommended measures to be taken to ameliorate the digital divide.               

Keywords: Digitization, Digital immigrant teachers, Digital natives, Digital divide Online learning.