Teaching Digital Natives

A few questions for you...

Can you remember the first time you used a computer?

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Can you remember the first time you were on the World Wide Web?

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Can you remember the first time you used a cell phone?

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The million dollar question...

Do you consider things like computers, the WWW, and phones to be "technology?"

Sir Ken Robinson

"Technology is not technology if it happened before you were born."
~Sir Ken Robinson

Growing up Digital

Digital Natives,
Digital Immigrants

Native?

Native?

Native?

immigrant?

Immigrant?

Immigrant?

Mark Prensky

Digital Natives,
Digital Immigrants

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

Not an incremental change

discontinuity

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Prensky: "Today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors."

immigrants

"Accent"

Read the manual?

"dial" a phone?

"A broken record?"

OMG ur my bff!

Save?

Prensky: "Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.

Natives

Receiving information *fast*

Parallel processing + Multitasking

graphics before text

Random access / hypertext

Networking

instant gratification

prefer games

Problem?

My students just don't...

I can't get them to...

They have no appreciation for...

Prensky: "Is it that
Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to?"

Assimilation into Culture

Does school need to change?

Two things:

• Change methodology
• Revisit our content

Today's teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students.

Teach both "Legacy" and "Future" content in the language of the Digital Natives.

Legacy content

• Ethics
• Politics
• Sociology
• Languages
• Logical Thinking

Future Content

• Software
• Hardware
• Robotics
• Nanotechnology
• Genomics

Teaching Legacy Content:
Translation and update of methodology

Teaching Future Content:
New content + Translation and update of methodology

PokéMon vs. geography

What do you think?

Problems with Prensky

Technology is changing society.
Education must change as well.

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books changed education

TEchnopoly

Postman's 3 Cultures:

• Tool-using cultures
• Technocracy
• Technopoly

Tool-users

• Tools are invented to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life
• Tools serve the symbolic world of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion
• All cultures were tool-users until the 17th Century

Technocracy

• Tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture
• mechanical clock
• moveable type
• telescope

Technopoly

• "Totalitarian technocracy"
• In a technocracy, two opposing worldviews (technological and traditional) coexist in uneasy tension. In a technopoly, one of those worlds disappears.

Elevation of information

Conditions for a Flourishing Technopoly

Postman: "Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures."

school + Internet?

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Is THIS what it
means to be
a digital native?

Technopoly reminds me of...

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Passanisi & Peters:
"Being a Digital Native is Not Enough"

Passanisi & Peters: "If students are not able to find answers to an Internet search in the first few results pages, they say 'I can’t find it,' instead of adjusting their search, or reexamining the results in depth."

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Nicholas Carr:
"Is Google Making
Us Stupid?

Carr: "Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages."

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Mark Bauerlein:
"The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Supefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)"

Bauerlein: "Most young Americans possess little of the knowledge that makes for an informed citizen, and too few of them master the skills needed to negotiate an information-heavy, communication-based society and economy. Further, they avoid the resources and media that might enlighten them and boost their talents."

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Jeremy Harmer:
"Shall We Kill Off the Digital Native?"

Harmer: "The effect of the wretched native/immigrant duality is to suggest that all kids are techno wizards. That all kids absorb technology like they breathe the air. And you know what, IT JUST ISN’T TRUE!"

Harmer: "Some children are instant techno wizards, but many others aren’t. Some kids spend all their time gaming, others don’t. Some kids spend all their time on Facebook, others don’t go anywhere near it (and are probably migrating away from it anyway as I write this blog)."

Harmer: "And you want to know more? Some adults who came to computers late are techno wizards and some aren’t. Some adults (I have met a few of them) spend hours of their life gaming, some don’t. Some adults spend all their time on Facebook. Many don’t."

The Digital Native:
Fact or Fiction?

Is it fair to say...

Prensky isn't wrong...

But he may not have it all JUST right...

Kids are acculturated into a digital society (technopoly?)

...but so are adults.

Kids don't *really* have a "native" sense of how to use technology.

Harmer: "So let’s STOP talking as if kids had some superior technical ‘connection’. Such an absurdity (like the native/immigrant duality, which may have had currency once but doesn’t cut it for me any longer) is just not sustainable and it perverts the way we discuss education."

Digital Citizens

shaping digital citizens

Tony Wagner:
"Creating Innovators"

Stultifying approach to Learning

Exponential growth of information

Tony Wagner:
"Increasingly in the twenty-first century, what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know."

5 things to shift in schools

• Individual Achievement vs. Collaboration
• Specialization vs. Multidisciplinary Learning
• Risk Avoidance vs. Trial and Erro
• Consuming vs. Creating
• Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: Play, Passion, and Purpose

David Jonassen:
Learning to Solve Problems with Technology

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interesting note...

Prensky himself has backed off from this natives/immigrants discourse in recent years!

Lately, Prensky talks more about
"digital wisdom"

Prensky (2009): "As we move further into the 21st century...the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants will become less relevant.

...I suggest we think in terms of digital wisdom."

Wisdom?

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and instruction."

Proverbs 1:8

Can we use technology with wisdom?

Can we TEACH
with wisdom?

How do we foster wisdom in our students?

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight."


Proverbs 3:5-6

soli deo gloria