Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives.

The dicotomy that once split the generations has grown beyond a mere temporal gap, and is increasingly becoming a technological one. Safety is often found in the familiar, and when we are faced with the unfamiliar, we begin to feel threatened. At its heart, this may be the reason that a digital cleft exists in education. Students familiar with technology and teachers unfamiliar with technology are at odds when trying to understand one another. Oldhat teachers will often continue to utilize what students see as boring teaching styles. But teachers cannot educate to the past, time doesn't work that way; they have to educate to the future, and this cannot happen when they cling to the old ways. Students engage the world in a way much differently from the way they did thirty years ago. Information is ubiquitous and the delivery methods for that information are various and ever-present. These are facts that need to be accounted for and utilized in the classroom. If we are to access the minds of students, we have to plug ourselves in to their world. Only then will we be educating the future and not the past.