Digital Natives And Digital Immigrants

{Digital Natives And Digital Immigrants}

Who are Digital Immigrant teachers and Digital Native students as categorized by the author?




Digital Native:


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. Today`s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.










Digital Immigrant:








Those were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them.













b. List down 3 differences between Digital Immigrant teachers and Digital Native students?


1- Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can't. Of course not they didn't practice this skill constantly for all of their formative years. Digital Immigrants think learning can't (or shouldn't) be fun.






2- Digital native they grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV. They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging. They`ve been networked most or all of their lives. They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.






3- 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.









c. What is meant by Digital immigrant accent? List down three examples of “digital immigrant accents.”

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


Example:


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).


Saying “Did you get my email?” phone call. Those Digital Immigrants can, and should, laugh at themselves and their “accent.”






d. According to the author, hat 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.





e. “Should the Digital Natives learn the old way, or should their Digital Immigrants learn the new?”


it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards. In the first place, it may be impossible – their brains may already be different. It also flies in the face of everything we know about cultural migration. 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


So unless we want to just forget about educating Digital Natives until they grow up and do it themselves, we had better confront this issue. And in so doing we need to reconsider both our methodology and our content.

f. What should the Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives?


Digital Immigrant as educators, they need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives. The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking. It's not actually clear to me which is harder – “learning new stuff” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.”


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


The author preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.


To reach Digital Native they need to reconsider both methodology and content:


- First, the methodology. Today's teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things. Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic in this fashion?” While it's not immediately clear, we do need to figure it out.






- 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. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.

- “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. But how many Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it? Someone once suggested to me that kids should only be allowed to use computers in school that they have built themselves. It's a brilliant idea that is very doable from the point of view of the students‟ capabilities. But who could teach it?