Smoke Signals of the Digital Natives

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Smoke Signals of the Digital Natives

• Who are the Digital Natives and How do They
  Communicate with Each Other and the World?

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The World is Digital

• Through the use of the Internet, mobile phones,
  and other hand-held devices, people are accessing
  and processing information in ways that challenge
  the historic business models that have held sway
  for decades, and are at the same time raising
  fundamental questions about the future of
  information dissemination and human interaction.
• Or to put it simply, everything you know has
  changed!!!

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Three Undeniable Truths

• Undeniable Truth 1
• Change is inevitable.
• Undeniable Truth 2
• Who we are as adults, is as a result of the sum
  of our childhood experiences, and these
  experiences, whether we acknowledge it or not,
  guide our biases and desires throughout our
  entire adult life.
• Undeniable Truth 3
• Most people resist change.

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Who Are The Digital Natives?

• Digital Natives are native speakers of
  technology, fluent in the digital language of
  computers, mobile phones, video games, and the
  Internet. Born into the digital world.
• They increasingly shun traditional media and
  cocoon themselves in digital media which becomes
  their primary channels for information and remote
  human interaction.
• Digital Natives, as a collective, dont just act
  differently, they think differently.

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What is this?
Camera
Or Digital Camera
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Who Are The Digital Immigrants?

• Digital immigrants are those people who were not
  born into the digital world but have, at some
  later point in their lives, either from a
  professional or personal perspective, become
  fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of
  the new digital technology.
• There must be a 3rd group not identified the
  group of people for whom these Internet-based
  technologies have no impact at all, the digital
  aliens?

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Digital Native vs Digital Immigrant

• There is much controversy over this. How does an
  age make you digitally proficient?

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Lifestyle Not Choice

• Being a digital native is a lifestyle not a
  choice that you make.
• Digital natives communicate with other digital
  natives in ways that they have in common with
  each other.
• Necessity being the mother of invention means
  that digital natives will create new ways to
  enhance their lifestyle.
• Which makes digital natives the drivers of
  revolutionary innovation.

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Digital Natives...

• ...are always on-line, multitasking...non-linear
  access to information
• ...communicate in a grid-like network with
  disregard to location, distance, time, and
  ethnicity...
• highly networked, interactive and social
• ...prefer to get information from sounds and
  video than text...
• ...use many different interfaces to
  communicate...
• ...generate not just absorb content...
• ...collaborate instinctively...
• ....verify information immediately...
• ....thrive on instant gratification and frequent
  rewards...

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Talking To Digital Natives

• Digital natives use various means to communicate
  and receive information, including
• Blogs, Social Networks, Instant Messaging, RSS
  Feeds, Discussion Forums
• Videos, Video Games, Virtual Worlds, Video
  Conferencing
• They do this, predominantly, using mobile phones
  and computers, via Internet

What tool do you use everyday that is missing
from the list?
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Natives vs Immigrants

• Digital natives
• Like receiving information quickly from multiple
  media sources.Like parallel processing and
  multi-tasking.Like processing pictures, sounds
  and video before text.Like random access to
  hyperlinked multimedia information.Like to
  network with others.Like to learn just in
  time.
• Digital immigrantsLike slow and controlled
  release of information from limited sources.Like
  singular processing and single or limited
  tasking.Like processing text before pictures,
  sounds and video.Like to receive information
  linearly, logically and sequentially.Like to
  work independently.Like to learn just in case.

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• Digital Natives generally have a much better idea
  of what the future is bringing than we do.
  They're already busy adopting new systems for
• communicating (instant messaging),
• sharing (blogs),
• buying and selling (eBay),
• exchanging (peer-to-peer technology),
• creating (Flash),
• meeting (3D worlds),
• collecting (downloads),
• coordinating (wikis),
• evaluating (reputation systems),
• searching (Google),
• analyzing (SETI),
• reporting (camera phones),
• programming (modding),
• socializing (chat rooms),
• and even learning (Web surfing).

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Lifestyle Not Profit

• Digital Immigrants innovate for a profit motive.
• Digital Natives innovate to enhance their
  lifestyles.
• They live by the WWW(World Wide Web) meaning
• Whatever
• Whenever
• Where ever
• .to enhance their life.

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What to do today?

• Create a process that can harness digital natives
  creativity.
• Google allows employees 20 of their time on
  personal projects of their own choosing.
• Most of Google's current products were initially
  personal projects.
• Create digital native mentoring programs with
  digital immigrants as mentors.
• There are no bad children just bad parents!

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One Last Thing

• Fact Today's digital natives are tomorrows
  digital immigrants.
• Hint Do you really believe that flash drives
  will be the predominate way of moving data in 20
  years.

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Good article

• http//www.newscorp.com/news/news_247.html
• http//www.openeducation.net/2008/07/14/of-digital
  -immigrants-power-browsing-and-bouncing-out/
• http//women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/
  women/families/article4295414.ece
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
• Go to this site to download a good presentation
• http//orenotes.blogspot.com/2008/05/digital-nativ
  es-vs-digital-immigrants.html