How Are These Students Different?
Digital Natives are different from us... How? They were born into a digital world. They do not know what it is like to live in a world without computers. These Digital Natives are knowledgeable with such Internet networking systems as social media. But what is social media? Wikipedia defines it as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Social media are media for social interaction, as a superset beyond social communication. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media substantially change the way of communication between organizations, communities, as well as individuals (Wikipedia).
Social media is not an uncommon way of communicating or online socializing for digital natives - These digital natives differ from generations before them because of the technologies at their disposal. Digital natives are digital learners, and are forced to take in so much so quickly. Digital natives have been subjected from an early age to constant technological innovations and advances, and are forced to re-adapt constantly. Digital natives thrive through social media with intrinsic rewards and available constant and instant feedback to their shared ideas online. As well, according to Marc Prensky, “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (pp 1). Digital technology is arguably the reasoning for the differing in students thought processes or brain function. Digital natives are storing so much information, and their thinking patterns may be different from that of previous generations. Thus these digital natives/students are different, or disconnected to previous generations who are attempting to keep up to these students who have “spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age”(pp1). These separate generations are experiencing technology differently, and their languages on technological subjects may sometimes clash. Can other generations not learn from difference? 
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