Time, your post makes it quite clear that not all students today fall into the category of digital natives and that ‘digital native’ needs to be qualified and not simply hailed as better than ‘digital immigrant’. You point out that there is no ideal or mainstream student and I agree. The classroom is a melting pot of varying degrees of digital nativeness that leaves it to the instructor to bridge all gaps, gaps in access to the technology, gaps in technical skills, gaps in the familiarity with the different modalities, and, let’s not forget this, gaps in writing ability. The instructor who in paper-n-pencil days could focus entirely on the writing process, today has to juggle and marry a number of literacies to facilitate an acceptable outcome, i.e. one that demonstrates mastery of multiple literacies, as Time points out.

I wonder if the divide might have less to do with the technological skills or access levels and more with the ability and comfort of being a content creator rather than a content consumer. Much of the 20th century was dominated by one-way broadcast media, TV and radio. We grew up as media consumers. Teenagers today are growing up as media creators who are used to seeing their content published for the consumption of others.

Looking at it from that angle might provide some valuable input into viable pedagogical concepts.