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Digital Native
What is the Digital Natives project?
An academic research team -- joining people from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland -- is hosting and working on the core of this wiki, which is the beginning stages of a larger research project on Digital Natives.
"Digital Natives" are those people for whom the internet and related technologies are givens, whereas "Digital Immigrants" migrated to these technologies later in life (Prensky, 2001). Digital Immigrants know how life existed in the pre-networked society, whereas Digital Natives take networked communication as the foundation of their lives.
The focus of this research is on exploring the impacts of this generational demarcation. By learning as much as we can about Digital Natives, their way of life, and their way of thinking, we can address the issues their digital practices raise, and shape our legal, educational, and social institutions in a way that supports and protects natives, while harnessing the exciting possibilities their digital fluency presents.
Why a Wiki on Digital Natives?
This wiki is a community work-space for posting information about Digital Natives. Please create an account or log in and start contributing. This site is particularly for parents, teachers, researchers, and DNs themselves to talk about what it means to be born digital and the implications of generational shifts in how people use technology.
We hope in particular that teachers and parents will use this wiki as a place to build out pages where they collaborate on the development of teaching ideas, best practices -- even jointly to create syllabi for different fields.
We encourage you to join in, though we ask that you use your name or a persistent pseudonym if you care to post. The most helpful things would be 1) to build out the narratives, the problems, the possible solutions, and the relevant research/articles for each of the topics we've set up so far or 2) to set up new topics or sections that you'd like to see similar work on by the community.
Have a video related to DNs? An audio file? A blog post? A bookmark? Link to them from here from the relevant section of the wiki. Or create a new section to fit your content. And feel free to use the "DigitalNatives" tag across taxonomies--Technorati, del.icio.us, all the rest. There's no reason why this wiki has to be dry and boring. Rich media will help us all understand the phenomenon better. So join in!
Table of Contents
Introduction to the Life of Digital Natives
Digital Identity
Digital Privacy/Safety
Digital Creativity
Digital Piracy
Digital Information Overload
Digital Information Quality
Digital Opportunities
Digital Education
Digital Access
Related Research Projects
- Global Kids - A NYC nonprofit that promotes digital participation among diverse youth, Global Kids asked more than 400 youth to participate in online discussions and communities, and to write essays about how they use, and what intrigues them about digital media.
- MIT | New Media Literacies project (NML) - "NML is developing a theoretical framework and hands-on curriculum for K-12 students that integrates new media tools into broader educational, expressive and cultural frameworks."
- Mills College - "This project is focused on expanding the California Survey of Civic Capacities and Commitments, an ongoing survey of high school students that explores how digital media has influenced their civic participation."
- Northwestern University | Web Use Project - "The study focuses on a diverse group of college students' Internet uses, participation and skill, and examines the relationship between the increasing spread of information technologies and social inequality."
- Project Zero | Ethical Perspectives on Young Persons' Use of Digital Media - "This project explores the impact of digital media on young people's ethical development, and develops a curriculum to foster ethical use of digital media."
- Stanford University/University of Chicago, Center for Urban School Improvement - "How can digital media enhance the learning environment for young people? This project is studying the after-school digital media program at Center for Urban School Improvement in Chicago to find out. They will determine how the program leads young people to seek out new learning opportunities, develop the skills necessary to work in a digital environment, and support their identity development."
- University of California, Berkeley/USC | Digital Youth Research - Explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives, with a focus on relationships, games, digital divide, and creativity. Focus is on spaces outside of schools.
- University of Oslo | Mediatized Stories. Mediation perspectives on digital storytelling among youth. - Four-year international project that "explores how people â youth in particular â use self-representation in digital storytelling to shape and share their lives, and tries to understand these processes through theories of mediation and mediatization across media studies and the field of education."