Marc Prensky opens his "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"(2001)
by stating that the problem with education today is that " Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer
the people our educational system was
designed to teach".
Pensky suggests that the arrival of digital technology in the last
decade of the 20th century can be marked as a
"singularity" – a dramatic break in the flow of generational
change. Prensky therefore holds that
"today’s students think and process
information fundamentally differently from their predecessors". He even
suggests that these changes might be found in the very manner in which the new
generation's brain functions. As far as thinking patterns are concerned,
Prensky is confident that thinks have already drastically changed.
Prensky calls this new generation of high technology usage "Digital
Natives", holding that "Our students today are all “native
speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet".
Consequently, all people born before the beginning of the digital era are
termed by Prensky as "Digital Immigrants".
Digital immigrants learn to some extent to adapt to their new environment
while retaining an "accent". The
problem that Prensky identifies regarding education is that "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Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are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",
thus creating a cross-generational dissonance.
According to Prensky, digital natives are accustomed to receiving information
really fast, parallel process and multi-task. Digital natives give precedence
to graphics over text. They are networked and need fast and easy gratification. All these is very foreign to digital
immigrants. These brings up some serious
problems when we come to education.
Education today rests on the assumption that learners are the same as
they ever were. This is according to Prensky no longer a valid assumption. Traditional
education cannot meet the needs and inclinations of the new digital immigrants.
Presnky thinks that what's done is done, and that the Digital Natives cannot and
will not go back to traditional ways of thinking and learning.
According to Prensky, this gap has to be addressed by the traditional
education system that needs to adapt itself to the new Digital Natives in both
content and methodology. Prensky
distinguished two types of content: "legacy" content which includes
things that were considered thus far as important such as reading, writing,
math and logic, and "future" content which regards digital and
technological matters. The challenge is
to combine the two together in a system suited for the needs of digital
natives.
This warrants some rethinking of what and how we teach our children. Teachers
that are, as Prensky terms it, "Digital Immigrants" have to cope with
the fact that their pupils are of a different making. Things will not go back
to the way they were up until now.
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