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Digital Natives

 

The expression “Digital Natives” originally comes from the English language and refers to the generation which was born into the age of the digital techno­logies. Using the World Wide Web, social media, apps, search engines, smart­phones and tablets is completely natural to them and they do it every day. The Digital Natives no longer consume content such as films or box sets through the tele­vision, but through the medium of the Inter­net, and they learn via Youtube and communicate via Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter & the rest. The term “Digital Native” itself was coined by Marc Prensky, an American educationalist and expert in digital learning. His article on “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” which was published in 2001 in the magazine “On the Horizon”, is considered to be the source of the expression, which is in extremely common use today. And by “Digital Immigrants”, Marc Prensky means the opposite of “Digital Natives”: people who only got to know digital techno­logies as adults and who are learning about them bit by bit.