My Brain Hurts

My last post on this topic mentioned the origins of this term. There are many educators that take issue with Prensky’s use of the digital native / digital immigrant concept. Jamie McKenzie http://fno.org/nov07/nativism.html takes a severe swipe at Prensky. McKenzie’s comments are both logical and valid and well worth a read. Labelling an entire generation with sweeping statements seems to be what has raised the ire of many. However Prensky’s terms, and the term digital tourist (visits technology occasionally) still have merit.

I don’t view these as derogatory terms but rather as loose generalisations. Today’s youth are more digitally aware than previous generations. I base this purely on observation and experience. Each generation is different, society changes, people grow up with different experiences. This is why teaching methods must evolve to cater for new learning needs. Note: cater for not pander to. Educations must create meaningful learning experiences and an understanding of digital technologies and their usage is fundamental to 21st century schooling.

To come back to McKenzies thinking though, any lesson needs to be delivered using the appropriate context – sometimes that may be using digital tools and sometimes it may not.

This term was coined by Marc Prensky several years ago to describe the great majority of today’s students who are growing up in homes and a society where technology is embedded in the fabric of that environment. In Prensky’s words “Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. ” (http://www.marcprensky.com)

This makes a lot of sense to me and is reflected by the behaviour I have observed in today’s students. I am surprised by the number of educators who have still not heard of this term, but when I explain it (and the term digitial immigrants) to them they do understand and agree with the point. A Wikipedia article on Digital Natives makes an interesting point that it was actually digital immigrants who built the Internet, but then continues to make some statements that appear to miss the point Prensky was making. The article is open for editing so it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

This week, five 5th Grade students on a television show were asked “What type of software are Internet Explorer and Firefox examples of?” Now these were intelligent students and prime examples of what a digital native is supposed to be, however, only one student gave the correct answer Web Browser and one other gave an answer that was close but not quite correct. Only one in five digital natives knows what a web browser is? Later in the same program they were asked “What is a graphical representation of a person?” and they all gave the correct answer Avatar. Hmmm, now this would appear to be a much more technical question than to identify a web browser.

Here we have an example that supports the digital native concept. If the students were asked to describe the functionality of Firefox et al then no doubt they would have done so easily. All you do is click on an icon and browse the web, nothing actually comes up to say You are using a web browser, so the term is logically not familiar to them.

You don’t just click on an icon and get an avatar, they need to be created. Progams where you create an Avatar would use that term repeatedly therefore the terminology becomes known.