From digital natives to digital literacy: Anchoring digital practices through learning design

While the academic community and the general public often refer to learners today as inherently tech-savvy digital natives, those in the educational technology community have long advocated for a move away from digital native stereotypes in favour of fostering digital literacy. As such, the educational technology community can play a vital role in shifting from popular conceptions of digital natives and toward developing digital literacy for the benefit of all learners. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of search data from Google Trends showing continued use of the term digital natives and the rising interest in digital literacy. In order to help educators move away from popularized concepts of digital natives by instead developing digital literacy in three domains, we propose a conceptual framework for anchoring digital practices within a Learning Design model.