Digital Natives vs Immigrants

My dad forwarded me an email this morning and, thankfully, it had nothing to do with supporting our troops or finding love via chain mail nor did it include bouncing smilies. It was a paper by Marc Prensky (server currently down) entitled “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”  The paper explains how today’s teachers are “digital immigrants” trying to teach “digital natives” and how the current system isn’t working.

I’m not an educator outside of the occasional study session for Materials but education is a very important issue to me. Something else I can blame on my parents. My dad’s a high school assistant principal, in charge of curriculum (and keeping the students from killing one another as they board buses and eat lunch). My mom’s one of the most passionate high school Spanish teachers in existance. She will literally take it as a personal insult when her students don’t do well on a test (whereas I would simply assume they’re idiots who didn’t study). Saying they’re committed educational professionals would be the understatement of the century.

Back to the paper. Prensky defines a digital native as someone who grew up with video games, the Internet, and cell phones. Essentially someone born after, oh, 1980. Those born previously are considered digital immigrants who speak with an accent due to having to learn to harness these technologies at a later age. Most teachers can be considered digital immigrants while their students (particularly at the primary and secondary levels) are digital natives. Prensky asserts that this is why are educational system is failing our students: their minds are not wired to learn via the methods that their teachers are using.

So how does he suggest educators bridge the digital native-digital immigrant divide? Change the learning methods to be better adapted to the random, inter-related, fast world that digital natives are used to. Here’s one example of how a CAD software company chose to market their new software to their most common class of users, males between 20 and 30:

(Prensky’s company) invented and created for them a computer game in the “first person shooter” style of the consumer games Doom and Quake called The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy. Its player becomes and intergalatic secret agent who has to save a space station from an attach by the evil Dr. Monkey Wrench. The only way to defeat him is to use the CAD software, which the learner must employ to build tools, fix weapons, and defeat booby traps.

I see this divide in my own studies. Although several of my professors have adapted their teaching to include technologies such as PowerPoint and the Blackboard online software (renamed BeachBoard on my school’s campus), few use any truly different teaching methods. My Materials professor still lists out each step required to determine the Miller indices for a crystollographic plane and my thermodynamics professor still makes us write down both the given and unknown variables for each problem. They are both members of engineering industry; it can be assumed both work with digital natives, knowing that we, like them, would prefer more fun learning methods. That’s not to say they are poor teachers, both are quite excellent, but learning from them seems slow, boring, hindered. They could certainly benefit from reading Prensky’s article, as would all educators.