Michael Allen's 2009 e-Learning Annual

3.1. DIGITAL NATIVES AND NEW MEDIA

Gen Y workers'sometimes dubbed as "digital natives"'have never known a world without ubiquitous access to computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and MP3 players! Marc Prensky (2001), a noted speaker, writer, and designer of digital learning environments, claims that as a result of extensive exposure to digital environments such as video games, workers born in the last quarter of the 20th Century actually have evolved different brains. Specifically, he states,

"Immense changes in technology over the past thirty years, of which video games are a major part, have dramatically and discontinuously changed the way those people raised in this time period think, learn, and process information" (p. 17).

Prensky reasons ...