Digital Natives is a term used to describe individuals who were born after 1980 and who have lived their entire life in the presence of easy access to large scale data networks via the Internet, easy access to computing through personal computers, and wide spread communications via cellular phones. These Digital Natives are entering college and rapidly joining the US workforce. Understanding how they view their life goals and objectives will have a profound impact on the way we educate them and how they can be integrated effectively into society. This award provides travel support travel for US participants to a research workshop on Digital Natives. The workshop will take place at KAIST (Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology) in Daejeon, South Korea, 4-6 November 2009.
The workshop will characterize our current understanding of Digital Natives and their potential impacts on culture, commerce and society at local and global levels. Interactions in the workshop will serve to frame a research agenda that could serve as a basis for future proposals that study the phenomena around Digital Natives in depth. The workshop will foster opportunities to exchange and share knowledge among invited thought leaders and facilitate identification of leading researchable questions to help satisfy knowledge gaps that will be identified through the workshop. The workshop will expose participants to an internationally diverse set of perspectives on intellectual topics around Digital Natives. This diversity will broaden and strengthen the intellectual capabilities of US researchers who attend the workshop.
