Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

These are my reflections for our first directed activity reading two articles by Marc Prensky. (lost the formatting when copying and pasting, only added a little back in. Something to contemplate - maybe that has shown my digital immigrant credentials!)

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

These two articles by Marc Prensky discuss the difference in thinking and learning experienced by those growing up immersed in the digital age (digital natives) and those who have had to learn to use digital technology later in life (digital immigrants). Below are highlighted quotes from the article summarizing the message, with some comments.

Prensky implies the view that you are either one of the other, native or immigrant, and yet I feel confused as to which I am. I was born in 1984 and fully remember a time before mobile phones, when you had to carefully arrange a time and place to meet in advance. I also remember going from looking up facts in our children’s encyclopedia at home, to looking up on Encarta on the home computer and then on to google, wikipedia… We never had a games console at home but I did become rather addicted to lemmings and tetris and would fall asleep with images of playing cards on the computer going round my brain during exam time from playing free cell or spider solitaire too often as a revision distraction. Overall I suppose I would assign myself as a digital native given the majority of my life has been immersed in this technology.

Overall I found the implications of the articles worrying. I support the general view that children today need to be taught in new ways that will engage the minds of these digital natives. But having been through an education system implemented by digital immigrants, I fear I will feel a conflict with the ‘proper’ (traditional) ways of teaching I have experienced, and am at a loss as to what new approaches can be implemented. Reflecting logically though, for there to be a change, one generation educated in a digital immigrant system will have to become the teachers in a digital native manner, and this course this year is to give me the direction for this style of teaching. It does strike me as an exciting time to be entering the education profession; hopefully we shall be ideally situated to implement this change.

This being said, in some senses I do feel I may have a slight advantage compared to others of my age. My father works for RM, according to their website: ‘the leading supplier of ICT to UK Education’. He would often bring new software home for us to try out and play on. I am not sure whether I saw this as education tool or a playtime tool, probably somewhere in the middle, which I guess it was.

One immediate concern that stems from these readings is the implication that all pupils today will have had access to and be fully immersed in digital technology. This cannot be true and will we be disadvantaging pupils from certain socio-economic backgrounds by teaching to digital natives. This indicates the importance of ICT lessons in and of themselves for Primary Children as well as implementing ICT into all subjects.

I do take a sense that the articles are an attempt at the justification for playing computer games. I also dislike the inference that certain digital immigrant practices are ‘wrong’. Just as the need to print off documents to read or edit them. Is there no consideration made for the effect on the eyes of staring at a computer screen?


Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
From On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001)
© 2001 Marc Prensky

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

today‟s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.

Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.

Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to
parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when
networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

But Digital Immigrants typically have very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice.

First, our methodology. Today‟s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students.

Second, our content. “Legacy” content and “Future” content. “Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc – all of our “traditional” curriculum. “Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them.

As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives

Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully. My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.

Although most attempts at “edutainment” to date have essentially failed from both the education and entertainment perspective, we can – and will, I predict – do much better.

We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us. The process has already begun – I know college professors inventing games for teaching subjects ranging from math to engineering to the Spanish Inquisition. We need to find ways of publicizing and spreading their successes.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II:
Do They Really Think Differently?

From On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 6, December 2001) © 2001 Marc Prensky


over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen—all before the kids leave college.

neuroplasticity. Based on the latest research in neurobiology, there is no longer any question that stimulation of various kinds actually changes brain structures and affects the way people think, and that these transformations go on throughout life.
This concurs with the small amount of reading I have previously done on the subject: ‘The Brain’s Behind It’, Alistair Smith.

people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about different things, they actually think differently. The environment and culture in which people are raised affects and even determines many of their thought processes.

And while we haven’t yet directly observed Digital Natives’ brains to see whether
they are physically different (such as musicians’ appear to be) the indirect evidence for this is extremely strong.

“Linear thought processes that dominate educational systems now can actually retard learning for brains developed through game and Web surfing processes on the computer.” 22

Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for anything else that actually interests them. As a result of their experiences Digital Natives crave interactivity—an immediate response to their each and every action. Traditional schooling provides very little of this compared to the rest of their world

Research done for Sesame Street reveals that children do not actually watch television continuously, but “in bursts.” They tune in just enough to get the gist and be sure it makes sense. In one key experiment, half the children were shown the program in a room filled with toys. As expected, the group with toys was distracted and watched the show only about 47 percent of the time as opposed to 87 percent in the group without toys. But when the children were tested for how much of the show they remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. “We were led to the conclusion that the 5-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what was for them the most informative part of the program. The strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.” 27
Fascinating – does that mean we should no longer tell children off for fidgeting and appearing not to pay attention to the teacher? What about distracting other pupils – is that also not a problem. When I was in a KS3 classroom, a teacher kept two children after class and explained that she was happy for them to doodle quietly at the back of their books during lessons, rather than distract the rest of the class by talking. I found this very strange but the teacher said she understood the need to be doing something if that would help them concentrate more. The pupils were very surprised too and couldn’t really believe the teacher was allowing them to do this – new to their way of learning too.

In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people.

Digital Natives accustomed to the twitch-speed, multitasking, random-access, graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-payoff world of their video games, MTV, and Internet are bored by most of today’s education, well meaning as it may be. But worse, the many skills that new technologies have actually enhanced (e.g., parallel processing, graphics awareness, and random access)—which have profound implications for their learning—are almost totally ignored by educators.

The trick, though, is to make the learning games compelling enough to actually be used in their place. They must be real games, not just drill with eye-candy, combined creatively with real content.