The Digital Natives

After reading Marc Prensky's thought provoking "Digital Native's Digital Immigrants", I exerienced an "aha moment". Prensky believes that the current generation of students from kindergarten to university are fundamentally different from any other generation, not only in speech, styles and taste in music but more importantly in the way they think and learn. This generation of students Prensky refers to as the 'digital natives'. He stated that they were born surrounded and bombarded by technology on a daily basis. Due to this, their brains are wired differently from ours. According to Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor University, different pathways for learning were developed due to enviroment in which they now live. They are able to engage in several activities at the same time, such as listening to music on an ipod, studying and texting or messaging all at the same time.

Prensky then described the rest of us as 'digital immigrants' due to the fact that we did not grow up in the digital age, we had to adapt and learn in order to survive and keep up. Yet some of us retain vestiges of our past. The digital immigrants can be seen printing documents for editing, rather than editing on screen, reading a manual first rather than assuming that the programme itself will teach how to use it.

Prensky insists that the biggest challenge facing the education system today is that our educators are immigrants in a digital world attempting to teach the digital natives. The natives engage in:

• parallel processing
• multi tasking
• prefer graphics before text
• and thrive on instant gratification and rewards.

The digital immigrants do not see much need for these skills and are still attempting to teach the natives using the same strategies that they grew up on. They also believe that since they cannot learn whilst listening to music or watching television that this will be the same for the natives.

Daily we are loosing our students to boredom. So unless the digital immigrants,( the educators) wake up and realize that their old teaching methods and strategies are rapidly becoming irrelevant, we will continue to widen the chasm between these two groups of dwellers.