This website is one of the best I found as it is produced by Marc Prensky himself, who is a leading theorit in the Digital Immigration debate. The website goes on to show Prensky's views on digital immigrants and digital natives and how students are no longer the same as they used to be as they concentrate mainly on information on websites and search engines compared to books and journals. He proves this by providing numerical evidence that today's students spend only 5000 hours reading but over 10,000 hours on the internet and playing video games. As you can tell Prensky's ideas are very one sided and this website doesnt really go into much detail about the similarities between digital native and digital immigrants!
Therefore this website goes into much detail about what constitutes a digital immigrant and a digital native. He defines a digital immigrant as someone who would rather print out a hard copy of a document to edit it rather than edit it on the screen. He also defines a digital native as someone who is native to the speak of video game, internet, etc.
He then goes onto argue that with the introduction of digital natives the current way of learning cannot be valid. He believes digital natives are no longer interested in (or ever have been!) learning gradually, step-by-step, indiviually and slowly. They need something to keep them interested, which in these days, as Prensky believes, should relate to this "downloadable, MTV era".
He believes it is impossible for digital natives to go back to the old way of learning as their brains have already been adjusted to this new advanced technology. He therefore feels teachers should educate in ways that the pupils are likely to enjoy even if the teachers dont necessarily agree with that type of learning. This idea of "edutainment" that he mentions currently, in his opinion, doesnt work, but he feels that with determination it can become successful in the future. A good example he uses is that if a child can remember over 100 names of pokemon, for example, then why shouldnt they be able to remember the 180 or so names, populations, capital and relationships of the nations of the world. Therefore its not about what they are learning that stops them from absorbing information but it is how they are being taught. This is a great example and one that I believe will be able to make this "edutainment" type of learning very successful in the future.
2 comments:
I like that this article was written by Prensky himself as then you know the information that is being presented is reliable.
I agree with what he says that once a person is a digital native they can't go back to old ways of technology. Personally i wouldn't be able to live without mobiles and the internet so i guess i'm that sort of digital native that Prensky talks about!
Sarah,
Good, I'm glad you've used this, I know that many other students have looked at this too. My goodness those statistics seem staggering don't they?
I think you summarize the key points of the arguments put forward here.
I think the key point that you discuss about the Pokemon names, perhaps has some argument in that.
All the best
Emma
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