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Due to the obvious divide set between digital natives and digital immigrants, sometimes both generations are forced to meet which commonly results in conflicting ideologies of digital technology. The everyday regime of worklife is becoming more technologically advanced with improved computers in offices, more complicated machinery in industry etc. With technology moving so fast it is hard for digital immigrants to keep up.

This creates conflicts among older supervisors and managers with the increasingly younger workforce. Similarly, parents clash with their children at home over gaming, texting, YouTube, Facebook and other Internet technology issues. The Pluralist Generation is made up of digital natives

Education, as Marc Prensky states, is the single largest problem facing the digital world as our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Immigrants suffer complications in teaching natives how to understand an environment which is "native" to them and foreign to Immigrants. Prensky's own preference to this problem is to invent computer games to teach digital natives the lessons they need to learn, no matter how serious. This ideology has already been introduced to a number of serious practicalities.

The term suggests a familiarity with technology that not all children and young adults who would be considered digital natives have, though some instead have an awkwardness with technology that not all digital immigrants have.

A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts.

Immigrants grew up learning one topic at a time, everything in order, following a linear and logical progression, but Natives do not think that way.

Another major difference between Immigrants and Natives is a sense of identity (DigitalNative.org, 2007).  To Digital Immigrants, cell phones, emails, and the Internet are just tools that can be used to reach someone or set up a “real” face-to-face meeting. Natives look at the same technologies and see an extension of who they are.

Digital communication is just as real to Natives as face-to-face meetings are to Immigrants.   

Many Immigrants consider education as the process that forces as much information into students’ heads as possible so they can regurgitate a laundry list of facts at a moment’s notice. Natives donotconsider this an education.

Immigrants should be willing to teach Natives how to find important information and put less emphasis on forcing the students to learn exact information.

Prensky, Marc. (2007) To Educate, We Must Listen. Retrievedfrom http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-To_Educate,We_Must_Listen.pdf

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