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Rebekah Dikkers Instructor: Malcolm Campbell English 1102 Monday, 6 February 2012 Topic Proposal: Digital Native, Digital Immigrants I will be examining how technology has changed throughout the generations and how it is affecting our daily life. Furthermore, I would like to focus my research on my parents generation, 1960s and my generation, 1990s, and I would like to see the difference in our college life. I remember the days when I used to roller skate, ride bikes and just growing up spending spare time outside of my house hanging out with my friends. From having a younger brother, who is seven years younger than I am, I could definitely see the change that technology has affected in newer generations and I am sure my parents feel the same way when they sees me.

To learn more about my topic, I did online research on Digital Native and Digital immigrants. Digital Native refers to the group of people who were born during or after the general introduction of digital technology, and Digital Immigrants refers to the group of people who was born before the existence of digital technology and adopted it to some extent later in life. I found a lot of information on ehis.ebscohost.com as well as from the article that Marc Prensky wrote. From the Prenskys article, I found out that todays average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games. Its sad how technology is taking away our valuable time.

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The complexity of my own topic is that since I am focusing on my generation and my parents generation, it would be easier for me to have a more information about my own generation from my own experience. Another complexity that if I use my parents as one of the recourses, it would be complicated since my parents went to Universities in Korea and I am attending the University in the United States, and it could be two separate subjects.

Initial Inquiry Question(s) Why do college students in the 21st century seem busier than college students in the 20th century when the technology does everything for them?

My Interest in this Topic I was interested in researching how technology is affecting the younger generations, but after talking to Professor Malcolm, I really wanted to write my paper with my own experience. Ever since I have been into college, Ive never had time for myself, and even if I have a little spare time for myself, I usually get on social networking websites and spend my time instead of hanging out with my friends. It made me wonder how different my parents went through my ages. I already know that our generation spends more time on technologies but I hope to know the reason why we are spending so much time on technologies and how we have gotten to this point where we are the natives and our parents are immigrants on digital area. .

Next Steps I will be reading some various articles on Google about Digital Native and Digital Immigrants, including articles from Marc Prensky, the database to search for the peer-review

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from the library, and also I would like to use my parents and my own experience as one of the sources.