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Digital immigrants' battle for survival

2022-1-SK02-KA153-YOU-0000536792022Mobility of youth workersongoing
Countries: SK|TR|CZ|PT|HU|PL · Grant: €0
Digital content, technologies and practicesDigital safetyDigital skills and competences

Objectives

The 21st century is the year in which change is observed in every aspect, especially the developing and changing technology is both included and intervened in our lives. However, these technological changes have also created a problem. This problem is the information inequalities that arise from asymmetric information. This problem has given birth to concepts that can cause discrimination between people. These concepts are digital natives and digital immigrants. There are various differences and distinctions are made between these concepts due to age, period, or generation difference. Digital natives use technology in “five different contexts: personal interest or entertainment, social communication, everyday use (such as storing or accessing information, looking at train tickets…), professional work, and university/study work”. With these features, it is said that digital natives are more inclined to learn in online environments. Digital natives have a number of basic features, unlike previous generations. These features are listed below: They want quick access to information, They prefer graphics over text, Instead of reading an article in a linear fashion from start to finish, they prefer to read it randomly in capsule form, They prefer games over serious work, Their cognitive structures are not sequential but parallel, They want to do many things at once, They want to learn by exploring. Considering the features listed above, speed, visuality, and entertainment are at the forefront in accessing information for digital natives. While they are reaching the data quickly, they want it to be in the form of rich visual, short if possible, packet data. On the Internet, they are open to game and entertainment data. It can be said that in the network, they do (can’t) not focus on the same subject for a long time because they deal with not only one but many subjects at the same time. “Digital immigrants – in contrast to digital natives – are people who were not born and lived in the digital world in any significant way, but found their own way in the digital world.” While trying to adapt to this new process, digital immigrants cannot give up some of their habits. “Digital immigrants consist of a generation that tries to adapt to the environments where these technologies are used and find itself in a new process with the development of technology”, however, it should also be considered that they also adapt to the internet and are related to technology. The purposes of digital immigrants to use and benefit from technology are generally due to a certain need; however, with the rapid spread of technology recently, it has started to serve purposes such as entertainment and chatting for them as well, apart from obtaining information. Nevertheless, the priorities of digital immigrants are to benefit from the tools brought by this culture. The main difference is these tools are a part of the digital natives’ lifestyle rather than making use of them. When the digital natives are evaluated in response to all these digital immigrants, it is desired and expected to reduce the asymmetric information in between and to reach close levels of technology knowledge between people in the age of technology. In this regard, our project will be carried out in order to increase the competence of youth workers in digitalization. Especially in the face of the various needs of youth workers, that is, digital immigrants, such a project issue was handled and it was aimed to evaluate their needs in the eyes of society. Within the framework of this subject, the general goal that we aim to achieve with our project has been determined as facilitating the adaptation of youth workers to this digitalization in the world that is in the process of digitalization and raising awareness on the subject.

Project partners (6)