At the beginning of the meeting I distributed the article “Global Natives Global Immigrants. I have always found this article as a useful starting point. Even though it is already five years old, it captures the change in students that we are seeing every day. A temptation for all is to categorize this change as “good” or “bad,” I prefer to simply accept that it is. In a way it is very freeing to approach these students as natives of a different country, my ways don’t have to be right and theirs wrong and vice-versa.
I think the bigger challenge comes with our role as educators. This is where the metaphor creaks a bit. We are immigrants with the job of raising the natives, so what parts of our culture must we essentially pass on to them and where must we accept the path of evolution? No one argues that for all their splendid facility with all things tech, that our students sometimes make HORRIBLE choices. How do we hate the choice, but accept the technology that made it possible?
A second problem we face is that the metaphor assumes a monolithic structure of “natives.” If we could assume that all of our students have these abilities, then we could learn and speak the language. Unfortunately young people are not uniform in their exposure and participation in the digital revolution. So whatever plans we put in place cannot be without instruction, and that instruction will need to be differentiated to meet the needs of all, something our system is not very good at doing.
I’m also not so sure about the conclusions of the article. Prensky seems to suggest that we turn most methodology over to video game designers (interestingly he IS a video game designer…w00t!). I think students can learn from games, but gaming is usually a solitary pursuit (even cooperative games are usually played by people at separate consoles miles (or countries) apart. The socialization and collaboration of the classroom cannot be matched by a video screen. Games of different sorts can be part of a solution, but they are not THE solution.
Anyway, if you want to read more of Prensky’s work, Part II of “DNDI” can be found at
and his blog is at
I agree the article ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’ poses some interesting concepts, but what struck me when reading it and after watching the “virtual keynote speech” (which I was able to view on a Windows platform on my duel processor Mac) is that these authors talk about the ‘digital age’ as if it just suddenly appeared, or maybe they just woke up to the fact that it is not going away. Prensky presents this view of ‘us’ and ‘them’ envisioning some sort of digital divide, but I know there are many who have embraced and adapted technology as it has developed. There are fewer and fewer educators who did not grow up in the ‘television age’ which was the last educational concern – us children of the ‘television age’ were also viewed as different learners. There are even fewer adults who were born before the invention of the radio – another world and educational changing event. So really, when did the ‘digital age’ begin?
I have witnessed changing fads in education during my careers as both student and teacher. Growing up and being educated in the 60’s and 70’s I witnessed the ‘space race’, the actual rocket launches and the TV versions – ‘Star Trek’, etc. I was also educated in a different way as a result. Many products of the space race trickled down into everyday use, it also influenced education and obviously brought change in the teaching areas of math and science, but also in language arts. The concept that learning is ‘measurable’ and can be demonstrated through testing is a direct result of how NASA managed to ‘win’ the space race. But have we found that evaluating student learning through standardized testing is the most effective method? Not in all instances.
I guess what bothers me the most about what Prensky is suggesting is that all students are the same, and they are not. What I have witnessed in my digital classroom is that there still exists diverse learning styles; the linear thinkers who do well with step by step, go at their own pace style, global learners who jump around but still manage to produce, and the hybrids who need different types of input depending on the task at hand.
I don’t believe there is any type of ‘one size fits all’ teaching, and as students, education and the world – digital and analog – change teachers need to have and use many kinds of teaching methods and be tuned in to what will work best with the students they are teaching at the moment. Every group of students has its own unique makeup, most teachers know this, their block 2 responds differently than their block 6 to the same lesson. What is better; teaching each block the same lesson in a different way or using several different teaching methods in a lesson so each student can at least have some small success in each lesson? If we as teachers are willing to embrace and employ all the methods available, traditional and cutting edge, our students will have a better chance of being educated.
one more thought. . .
the students that have been designated as ‘ADD’ – they jump from thought to thought, don’t spent much time on any one task, pull in information from many different areas, and when they manage to focus can excel –
Isn’t this also a description of the kind of learners who will do best in the digital classroom?
Could the ADD mind just be the next evolution?
I completely agree with Catherine in that their is not a “…one size fits all…” for teaching students. In addition, I in no means consider myself technology savvy, however I also don’t fit Mr. Prensky’s definition of a ‘Digital Immigrant’. I think their are a lot of teachers who are educated on technology, although not near to the level of their students (or even close to their texting speeds!).
I don’t disagree with either of you. Clearly WE are the leaders who are making sense of the new tools available to us and to our students. To use Prensky’s image, the “immigrants” bring experience that contextualizes the world of the “native” To suggest the students are all of a mold is simplistic and incorrect. However, a good number of young people use tools with enormous facility and instinct that suggest a different type of knowledge from what I bring to tech. There is still a “writing with my left hand” feel about most of what I do, and sometimes I feel like I am translating in my head into “digital.”
One thing that we who are “deep in it” lose sense of is how bewildered some of our colleagues still are by what we do every day. A large number of teachers know how to do many things,but they know them by rote, with no real understanding of why or how things happen (I don’t mean at the programming level, I mean at the cut-and-paste level).
Going back to where I started, it is still up to us to help students find meaning and purpose beyond the skills themselves. This is the next jump that I am looking for. Our current technology use has a distinctive feel of “new wine into old wineskins.” PowerPoint has replaced writing notes on the board (only writing notes had freedoms that PP has taken from us!). For students PP has replaced the poster board project. Google has replaced the encyclopedia. Texting has replaced writing notes to friends. We have worked at holding on to older comfortable forms and fit technology into them.
So while I agree completely that neither students nor teachers are uniform in their skills or understanding, I think an essay like this is a valuable jolt to start ideas flowing.