Are you a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant?

If you are reading this blog, you probably at least speak the ‘digital native language’. A digital native is someone who grew up in the digital age surrounded by digital technology, whereas a digital immigrant came upon digital technology later in life. These terms were coined by Marc Prensky, an author and game designer in the areas of education and learning. He argues that today’s learners are different and that this difference has serious implications for education. Further, he states “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”. His classic article Digital Native, Digital Immigrants is from 2001, but I think it is still relevant today.

Do you think these terms are accurate? Should there be another category, such as assimilated digital immigrant? Do you think this concept is just part of the generation gap? Or is it something more?

Social reference management

I've been using EndNote locally on my machine for years. With Web 2.0, we have the option to use online reference management tools that allow us to collaborate with others. EndNote Web provides this function. Connotea is a well-known tool that "grew up" and exists purely as a Web application. Others include Labmeeting, CiteULike, and WizFolio (which I have recently started using).

One feature of WizFolio that I really like is the ability to upload a PDF and let WizFolio use metadata to create a citation for the PDF. It also will go out and search for PDFs of citations that you enter maually or through an upload from your existing management software. It is free (for now) but I wonder how long that will last.

What are you using? What do you think about it?