As a bit of a follow up to the fooferah around Fred Wilson Can Kiss My Ass post over here, regarding whether Digital Natives do or don’t exist, there’s an interesting article on Digital Natives at the Library. A few weeks ago you might recall a whiny cacophony of bloggers proclaiming just because they were old didn’t mean that they couldn’t be a digital native. Which I thought was a bit funny, as it seemed to be a situation of them protesting a little bit too much

At any rate, while the article is thought provoking, taken together with the commentary, it certainly does provide a further picture of what a digital native is, that is to say someone who was born with and grew up with computing — and how they are different than digital immigrants. The article tends to focus on gaming, principally.

For example:

• Going to school with no physical books, only PDF’s
• An emphasis on learning by trial and error, rather than by didactic teaching methods: Helping students learn by overcoming roadblocks, rather than before they begin.
• “Natives have a different relationship with language and visual representation; even a different understanding of interpersonal conduct .. . To people in this world, digital avatars aren’t abstract. Many children spend more time in game worlds than their own neighborhoods.”

Interesting stuff, and further reinforces my own opinion in that that digital natives do exist, and I am not one of them — and neither, do I suspect are many of you. While I might share a few things in common with digital natives, I think its easy to see that a ‘traditional’ environment is quite different, and therefore, will have different effects on how one interacts with things, learns with things and deals with others.

Its hard to imagine, for example, what it would have been like with something like the World of Warcraft to play with as a 10 year old — or other immersive virtual environments if I was younger. The closest thing that *might* have existed were BBS’s, but even then, the always-on environment was an utter impossibility for most people unless you had a dedicated line for dial-ups (never mind all the psychedelic 8 bit ASCII graphics).

Which brings me back to my original point.

While its a thought provoking article on what makes Digital Natives digital, didn’t anyone else find it terribly ironic that Digital Natives would probably never go to library in the first place?

I’ll be honest. I started going to university at the cusp of this kind of Digital revolution myself (and that was 10 years ago). Then, as now, I will readily say that I have never had to physically go through many, if any, medical journals to do any research. The medical indexes have always been available online to me, and so are many of the important medical journals.

Its virtually unfathomable that there was once a time when you had to manually trudge through stacks and stacks of journals to find an article and photocopy what you need.

And if that’s the case, I can’t imagine what its like for students who can just look anything up on Wikipedia to find a short (probably) unbiased introduction to a topic complete with references and further links.

Interesting Read: “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”  a bit of a scholarly look at the phenomenon … from 2001.