How old is a Digital Native?

Recently in the Second Life Education Forums there was a thread discussing the trend of adults who didnt grow up with computers now integrating more digital things into their lifestyle.

The term for these people is "Digital Immigrants". In contrast, a "Digital Native" is born late enough to always be around digital things.

The discussion seemed to imply that a digital immigrant could evolve into a digital native by immersing themselves in digital technology until they reach some "comfort level" that might be similar to that of a digital native. I feel like there's a point that has been missed here... so let me explain my reaction:

In my experience a Digital Native has the distinction of never having been in a non-digital world. Where the digital nature of things is for them, like the circulatory system of the world, for a digital immigrant it's just skills.

In my experience you can really tell the difference in pressured situations.

Tell a native and an immigrant that they have 5 minutes to successfully fill out and send an online form complete with signature and in most cases you'll get two very different solutions, even if the immigrant is comfortable with digital things.

The native will fill in the form online or save the form in a document that allows that. The immigrant will print it and handwrite the info into the fields.

The native will register themselves with a digital signature service like Adobe, and immediately apply the signature (which isnt a signature at all, just an ID code, much harder to forge) then send off the document with full confidence of its readablity and security.
The immigrant has now handwritten their responses and proceeds to find a FAX machine to send it through, or scans it and sends it as a graphic file which on the receiving end leaves it impossible to copy/paste from so someone there will have to re-enter all the info again by hand, we hope accurately, but certainly an hour later.

There is a fundamental difference in the entire flow of "getting things done" between immigrants and natives and often a big difference in the end result.

Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab wrote a book "BEING DIGITAL" about the war between atoms and bits, and spoke of one of the bit's big advantages, the ability to change forms without losing substance. Digital natives are intuitive about how to convert forms of information into other forms without ever making the info analog.

If you have an email and you print it out it has now lost all it's digital functionality. It's no longer editable, or easily shared. If however you convert an email to a Word doc, or a PDF, or even a text-based graphic, it's still editable and easily shared. You could even convert it to sound by letting the computer read it to you.

This kind of shape-shifting is only really intuitive to an individual that has never known another way of doing things.

So can a digital immigrant evolve into a digital native? By definition I'd say it's very rare.