My elder son Oli is almost 15 and way beyond the stage where I might usefully help with his homework. But in the run-up to his recent end-of-year exams, I felt compelled to take a hovering interest in his revision. This chiefly involved loitering on the landing and popping into his room at frequent intervals laden with the laundered contents of his sock drawer.

Every time I crossed the threshold, the scene was the same: textbooks remained firmly closed in his bag while the laptop was open on his desk.

On the screen was some history/ physics/English document, but also his Facebook and iTunes pages. In his ears were the iPod plugs, playing back a podcast. And sometimes, just to fracture his concentration even further, he might have had a half-played video running on YouTube as well.

If you are the parent of a teenager, this vignette will be familiar. We each have our breaking points and one night during that exam period I reached mine. How, I wanted to know, as I scooped up the laptop and announced that I was confiscating it until further notice, could he be absorbing the finer points of photosynthesis and his French vocab if he treated his mind like a pogo stick?

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Was I being an unreasonable, autocratic, helicopter mother? My son would tell you definitely yes, while friends battling with their own teenagers assure me I'm not. It took the impartiality of my geeky acquaintance Ben, however, to unearth the truth: “He's a digital native; you're a digital immigrant. Your brains are never going to be on the same circuit system.”

Digital natives and digital immigrants are terms coined by the American futurist Marc Prensky to distinguish between those who have grown up with technology and those who have adapted to it. As an immigrant, I may be computer-proficient, but I still print out documents to read them, call people to check they received my e-mail and keep a dictionary by my desk. And I can remember (admittedly only in a vague way) that when it came to exam revision, I spent many hours sealed in my room away from the TV and other distractions, my head burrowed in books. Natives, in contrast, multi-task, thrive on instant gratification and claim to function best when networked. None of this is new. Prensky first wrote about natives and immigrants (and the startling fact that today's average student will, before graduating, spend 10,000 hours computer-game playing, but only 5,000 hours reading books) seven years ago.

What is new and perturbing is the emerging evidence of the consequences of this digital divide. According to researchers we are in the midst of a sea change in the way that we read and think. Our digitally native children have wonderfully flexible minds. They absorb information quickly, adapt to changes and are adept at culling from multiple sources. But they are also suffering from internet-induced attention deficit disorder.

Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner- Centred Design at the London Knowledge Lab and a visiting professor at the University of Sussex, is working on a study examining the internet's impact on pupils' critical and meta-cognitive skills. “The worrying view coming through is that students are lacking in reflective awareness,” she says. “Technology makes it easy for them to collate information, but not to analyse and understand it. Much of the evidence suggests that what is going on out there is quite superficial.”

The experience with which my generation grew up, of absorbing oneself in a single book and allowing its themes to meander into the mind before forming considered judgments, is in danger of being eclipsed by the new, digital world order.

This year, researchers at University College London reported the results of a five-year study into the “Google Generation”. When they examined the behaviour of those logging on to the websites of journals, e-books and other sources of written information, they found widespread evidence of “skimming activity”. Users viewed no more than three pages before “bouncing out”.

This wasn't just the norm for students. “The same has happened to professors and lecturers. Everyone exhibits a bouncing/flicking behaviour, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically. Power browsing is the norm.”

Power browsing, I have to concede, has become the norm for me. Google has been my godsend as a writer. Research that once required hours of trawling through reports and cuttings, and days of fielding calls to source experts, can be done in a few clicks of a mouse.

The difference, though, is that as a digital immigrant, my mind has baseline skills in concentration, contemplation and knowledge construction. My fear - and the reason why I wrested my son's laptop away from him - is that the acquisition of those skills is being lost in the twitch-speed of our new Web 2.0 world.

Brian Kelly has been championing the digital revolution since setting up one of the first educational websites at the University of Leeds in 1993. He's now a national adviser to higher education, based at the University of Bath. I'm not surprised when he tells me I was wrong to confiscate my son's computer. “When I was doing my physics A level, I had one standard textbook in which everything was gospel. Your son can go online, find information that challenges the text and then he can network with others, compare notes and even e-mail the experts.”

I can see that that broadens his knowledge, but does it deepen it? “Education has always been about absorbing the facts first and reflecting on them second. Technology is not hampering that, but take away his laptop and you are just setting him up for a rebellion,” Kelly says. “The technology tide is unstoppable.”

Wilma Clark, a former IT teacher and now a researcher at the Institute of Education at the University of London, is more sympathetic to my panic measures. “I shouldn't worry about him being on Facebook. All he is doing is using technology to replace the friend who might have come to do his homework with him,” she says. She points out that when teaching, she often encouraged students to listen to their iPods during practical tasks, “because it prevents them from chatting and losing concentration”.

Children do have the capacity to assimilate learning faster and simultaneously from multiple sources, says Clark. “The downside is that they expect more variety, so their boredom threshold is falling. Some teaching is adapting to that and becoming more dynamic, some is not.”

When faced with a homework deadline or an exam, though, she is convinced that pupils do focus. “But like all of us, they won't do something until they have to, unless they are passionate about it.”

I recovered quickly enough from my hissy fit and returned my son's laptop the next evening. The proof of the pudding would be in his results, I decided, and now that they have come in, I have to concede that the social networking/internet surfing/revision combo threw up no surprises. From the pleasing to the mediocre, his grades were predictable.

Today's teenagers have an assumed ownership of technology. Like many parents, I haven't joined Facebook, MySpace or other social networking sites. I've resisted on the basis that it would be as embarrassing to my children as it would be if I hung out with them dressed in a miniskirt. But, having spoken to various experts, I realise I have been misguided in allowing him to think of all internet innovations as his domain. It's worth remembering, after all, that it was the creative, ground-breaking minds of digital immigrants that invented the internet.

“Because they have been using digital technology all their lives, our children feel they have authority over it,” says Rose Luckin. “But technology cannot teach them to reflect upon and evaluate the information they are gathering online. For that, the role of teachers and parents remains fundamentally important. You are in the hot seat. They still need you to open that conversation.”

NATIVES v IMMIGRANTS

Digital natives
Like receiving information quickly from multiple media sources.
Like parallel processing and multi-tasking.
Like processing pictures, sounds and video before text.
Like random access to hyperlinked multimedia information.
Like to network with others.
Like to learn “just in time”.

Digital immigrants
Like slow and controlled release of information from limited sources.
Like singular processing and single or limited tasking.
Like processing text before pictures, sounds and video.
Like to receive information linearly, logically and sequentially.
Like to work independently.
Like to learn “just in case”.

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