Teachers Teaching in the New Mediascape: Digital Immigrants or ‘Natural Born Cyborgs’?

Abstract

Schooled in an earlier time, educators are laboring to find meaningful purchase in new media environments, unable to match the fluency and sophistication of their ‘digital native’ students. Yet is Marc Prensky's portrayal of teachers as ‘digital immigrants’ really an accurate rendering of the today's situation? Drawing on phenomenological and posthuman literature, the authors reconsider teachers' everyday involvements with technologies, and explore new ways of conceptualizing teachers and students in today's mediatic situation. They suggest that teachers and students alike are more aptly – and less divisively – visualized as digital migrants or nomadic cyborgs navigating and acclimatizing to a restless twenty-first-century educational scene.

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