Friday, March 9, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky.
Digital Natives, Digital
Immigrants by Marc Prensky.
a.
Who are Digital Immigrant teachers and Digital Native students as
categorized by the author?
Digital Native
students:
What
should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for
Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found
for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of
the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.
It is now clear that as a result of this
ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today‟s
students think and process information fundamentally differently from
their predecessors. They have spent their
entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music
players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the
digital age
Digital Immigrant
teachers : So what does that make the rest of us?
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.
b.
List down 3 differences between Digital Immigrant teachers and Digital
Native students?
Digital
Natives students: 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 teachers: typically
have very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have
acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice. These skills
are almost totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned – and so
choose to teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and
above all, seriously.
c.
What is meant by Digital immigrant accent? List down three examples of
“digital immigrant accents.”
The
“digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the
Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for
a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it.
examples
of the digital immigrant accent:
They
include printing out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you
– an even “thicker” accent); needing to print out a document written on the
computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and
bringing people physically into your office to see an interesting web site
(rather than just sending them the URL). My own favorite example is the “Did
you get my email?” phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and
should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”
d.
According to the author, what is the biggest serious problem facing
education today?
the
single biggest problem facing education today 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. This is
obvious to the Digital Natives – school often feels pretty much as if we've
brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to
lecture them. They often can't understand what the Immigrants are saying. What
does “dial” a number mean, anyway?
e.
“Should the Digital Natives learn the old way, or should their Digital
Immigrants learn the new?”
I prefer
the second choice, the digital immigrants learn the new way. Because today's
learners are difference. They are no longer like the teachers when they were
students. Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and
forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they
don't know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them
learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of
their time grousing about how good things were in the “old country.” There should
be some improvement. First, our methodology. Today's teachers have to learn to
communicate in the language and style of their students. Second, our content.
It seems to me that after the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of
content: “Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for old systems) 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.
It is of course still important, but it is from a different era.
“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. This “Future” content is extremely interesting to today‟s
students.
f.
What should the Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach
Digital Natives?
So we have to invent, but not
necessarily from scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives
has already been done successfully.
for example ,In math, the debate must no
longer be about whether to use calculators and computers . they are a part of
the Digital Natives. world . but rather how to use them to instill the things
that are useful to have internalized, from key skills and concepts to the
multiplication tables. We should be focusing on ¡°future math¡± .
approximation, statistics, binary thinking.
Another example, In geography – which
is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can
memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history
and evolution can‟t learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of
all the 101 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented.
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.
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