User:Da9iel/sandbox

The term Digital Native was coined and popularized by education consultant, Marc Prensky in his 2001 article entitled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, in which he relates the contemporaneous decline in American education to educators' failure to understand the needs of modern students. His article posited that "the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decade of the 20th century" had fundamentally changed the way students think and process information, making it impossible for them to excel academically using the outdated teaching methods of the day. In other words, children raised in the post-digital, media saturated world, require a media-rich learning environment to hold their attention. Contextually, his ideas were introduced after a decade of worry over increased diagnosis of children with ADD and ADHD, which itself turned out to be largely overblown. Prensky did not strictly define the Digital Native in his 2001 article, but it was later arbitrarily applied to children born after 1980, due to the fact that computer bulletin board systems, and Usenet were already in use at the time, although prior to 2000, it was still uncommon for children under the age of 13 to have a personal computer at home. The idea became popular among educators and parents, whose children fell within Prensky's definition of a Digital Native, and has since been embraced as an effective marketing tool.

Origins
It is generally accepted that Prensky coined the term Digital Native in 2001, however documentarian Douglas Rushkoff attributes the use of the digital native/immigrant metaphors, as far back as 1994, to John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. Additionally, Barlow is quoted in an interview published in 1995, in which he described persons under the age of 25 as "closer to being a native, in terms of understanding [cyberspace]," and again used the metaphor in his 1996 essay, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Douglas Rushkoff also takes credit for popularizing the term "in lectures and films starting in about 1994," after first hearing it from Barlow.

Conflicts in Education
Because the term Digital Native implies an innate understanding of digital technologies, educators often expect their students to be competent users of the Internet, software, and messaging systems. This may lead to situations in which the Digital Native is not given full or proper instruction in the use of these technologies, which then disrupts the learning process. In one example, a university professor informed his class that his course syllabus would be sent to students via their university supplied email address. He later found that many of his students had not read the syllabus because they did not know how to set up an email client, and were unmotivated to learn how, due to their preference for text messaging. This implies a reality in which digital technology is varied, and complex, and one which cannot be learned simply by being born in a certain year. If not for the pervasive use of the Digital Native metaphor, instruction in the use of technologies that are not as widely used, or are out of vogue, would be less likely to be overlooked.

Additional
Young people 18-25 years old are consistently more vulnerable to phishing attacks than those who are older, according to a new study by Wombat Security Technologies.