Digital-Natives

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About Digital-Natives

Are you 'digitalized'?!
A discussion about digitalization and its effects on culture and photography.

We are a group of photography students - 'digital natives' and a photography teacher a 'digital immigrant' (or somewhere in-between).

These terms were coined by Marc Prensky in 2001; a digital native being someone that was 'born digital', they grew up with digital technologies such as the internet, MP3s and mobile phones, making digitalization their first language. Whereas an immigrant is someone who was not born into the digital world, but at some point has become interested in it and learnt or rather had to adopt 'new' technologies... like a new language and as Prensky says we 'immigrants' always retain an accent to some degree, having one foot in the past... and in education this is an issue because "our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of a pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language."

The group has been formed to aid a piece of educational research interested in photography and the future of photography education, and to give the learners a voice. It also hopes to digitalize its immigrant!