Digitalization and Intergenerational Learning

Introduction

The widespread use of digital technologies, both personally and institutionally, especially the Internet, in education, health, business, and many other areas, indicates the pervasive impact of digitalization on our lives (Gray and Rumpe, 2015; Karagözoğlu-Aslıyüksek, 2016). While digitalization shapes societies in different dimensions (economic, social, educational), the transformation that takes place is not just a technical and economic transformation. Digitalization has many individual, social, cultural, social and economic effects.

Digitalization primarily affects the individual, who is the fundamental component of society. Individuals interact with the Internet and many digital media and tools in complex ways within the context of their social environment. In this interaction process, it is an important requirement for individuals to be able to use, benefit from and adapt to the opportunities offered by the digital environment. Thus, individuals need to be able to work and develop their digital literacy skills effectively and efficiently. Accessing, using and interpreting information, communication and collaboration; integrating information and content; security and problem solving skills in digital environment form the basis of digital literacy. However, the potential of technologies ranging from low-bandwidth technologies to artificial intelligence, Web 3.0, or aggregation technologies, including metaverse, challenges individuals to acquire the ability to adapt to digitalization in order to gain all kinds of new information they encounter throughout their lives, so as to improve their digital literacy and their fluency, too.

Digitalization has various effects on human generations, and on societies as a whole of relations of generations. According to their experiences in the Digitalized World; Societies are classified into two basic groups as digital natives who use the digital space very well and are born into the digital world, and digital immigrants who have to switch from using traditional and manual methods to digital methods and struggle to adapt to the digital world (Prensky, 2001). In addition to these classifications, generations older than digital immigrants are defined as digital settlers, and generations defined as digital natives are defined in a continuous context as digital hybrid, Z generation and Alpha generation (Cilliers, 2017; Howe & Strauess, 1991; Hernandez- de-Menendez etal., 2019).

Digitalization not only affects individuals and generations, but also causes change and transformation in education. With the change of the concept of "knowledge", the change and transformation of the roles, knowledge and skills of the teacher and the learner in education has begun. In the digitalized world, education resembles a broad and complex spectrum in which different generations take the roles of learners and teachers. In such a case, it is thought that there is a need for an understanding that will bring together generations, different perspectives and interpretation styles on a common ground, as is the case with the understanding of intergenerational learning.

In this context, this section presents a discussion of the contribution of the understanding of intergenerational learning to educational environments in the digital age, along with the changes and transformations that digitalization has brought to education. The following section first explains the concept of digital transformation, discusses the place of intergenerational learning in digital transformation, and examines the impact of digital transformation on education, individuals, and generations.