Young = Wired?

[Andrew Reinhard]

I wish I had the citation handy, but I recently read an article that said that while younger students do seem to know about new technology, gadgets, and the like, their depth of knowledge about how to actually use technology is surprisingly little. There is also a perception that new Classics teachers are naturally predisposed to new technologies, seem to be comfortable exploring their use in teaching, and can intuit function. Is their any truth to this? I'm guessing that "people are people" and some young folks will be wired for sound while others will stick to books. The same holds, I am guessing, for "older" teachers, too. But maybe there is a trend between youth and technology in pursuit of better pedagogy?

[Shawn Graham]

It was Marc Prenksy I think who coined the phrase 'digital native' to suggest people who have grown up immersed in digital technology and who understand it intuitively, unlike us 'digital immigrants' who have to learn the ways and byways from scratch (I think his website is games2train.com). I sometimes think his division is a bit too cut-and-dried, since 'digital native' implies a greater depth of understanding than may be warranted. Last winter I taught media literacy via the Horizon-Wimba platform to students all over Quebec. For high-school students I was surprised to find how little they were actually aware of how to actually use digital media. The course was supposed to explore the implications of internet technology, but I had to do a lot of back-tracking first to get them to the point where the discussion could begin. Sure they could send an instant message, but I often had to hold their hand when it came to doing anything more complex than that! I call them 'digital wood-elves', in homage to that part of the Hobbit, where Bilbo et al come into contact with the wood elves of Mirthwood (at least, I think it was Mirthwood) who are surrounded by magic but really don't understand their own magical heritage.

A stretch, I know. But I think there needs to be a category between 'digital native' and 'digital immigrant' to capture that.

[Laura Gibbs]

There's a very useful and detailed critique of Prensky's vaunted "digital natives" slogan here:

Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions and Digital Deprivation

Personally, I haven't found Prensky's sloganeering useful; I'd much prefer to flesh out the idea of "digital literacy," where my students are coming up short, as they are in traditional literacy - I'm all for working in the digital realm, but I am still trying to learn what we can be doing as teachers to assist students in gaining digital literacy (and thus autonomy, independence, creativity). Calling them "digital natives" to me is kind of like the problem with "native speakers" - just because someone is a native speaker of a language, doesn't mean they are self-aware of the language that they are speaking, and it is this element of self-awareness that is the key to taking charge of your own learning, I think. :-)