"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"

"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"

1. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach (p. 1)

2. Today‟s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. 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 (p. 1)

3. Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives (p. 1)

4. 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. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine (p. 1)

   • Their thinking patterns have changed

5. Digital Natives: Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet (p. 1)

   • 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.
   • They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction (p. 3)
   • Often from the Natives" point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience – and then they blame them for not paying attention (p. 3)

6. Digital Immigrants: 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 (p. 2)

   • As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. 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. Today"s older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.
   • Digital Immigrants think learning can"t (or shouldn"t) be fun. (p 3)
   • Digital Immigrants don"t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can"t (p. 3)
   • Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid (p. 3)

7. 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 (p. 2)

8. First, our methodology. Today"s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students (p. 4)

   • Second, our content (p. 4)
     • “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.

9. So we have to invent, but not necessarily from scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully (p. 4)

10. We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us (p. 6)

11. So if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change (p. 6)