Marc Prensky. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Part 1.
First, the author states that the brains of today's young people might have physically changed or at least their thinking patterns are different. Marc Prensky calls these students Digital Natives who were grown up with technology. We, or the generation who grew up without technology, but have adapted it, are Digital Immigrants. The difference between those two is that the latter always have their past which was technology-free or at least computer free environment.
Prensky is concerned with the Digital Immigrant instructors for Digital Natives, because as today's youth processes information very fast, they prefer games and like multitasking, but the older generations are used to serious, step-by-step learning. He suggests that today's teachers should skip the step-by-step part and teach today's students more randomly, and to learn to teach old things in a new way. Prensky himself likes to adapt old content to games.
It is interesting how the author brings examples of games that were designed in order to learn a difficult program or how to teach different subjects in the "Digital Native" language. Key concept here is pace - everything has to be done in a faster manner than the traditional academic way. It is also useful to use your own students to help you develop content.
The article had a point in it when the author said that today's learners are different. They often parallel some words from the English lesson with some games, or they give examples from the games. I think that in a reasonable amount games would be fine, but there are other technologies what to implement.
Marc Prensky. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Part 2: Do They Really Think Differently?
This is an interesting article in the sense that it reveals quite a lot of interesting about our brain. People have a brain that changes according to the influence it gets. It is not true anymore that the brain cells get damaged over a period of time and will not recover, the author tries to prove that the brain constantly reorganizes itself all our child and adult lives (p. 2). This kind of reshaping takes time and needs thorough focusing.
Another revelation from this article taken from the studies of different social psychologists' research shows that people of different environments and cultures think in a different way (p. 3).
The author goes through the history of retraining the brain - first the speech-oriented brain needed to adapt to written language, then TV and now video games and computer games. Their attention span is not very long for the traditional lesson, but while playing games, they pay more attention to different facts. For example my pupils have learned fish names from some game, and they used it in a food-related word play (note that all of the students were not familiar with the words, and they were not even food words, but they still used them).
The author talks about the problems in this field as well, such as reflection, critical thinking and elaborating on the topic. He suggests that more should be done in this area, but still in the Digital Native's language.
I agree with the author when he says that today's Digital Immigrant instructors see that something is different with the kids, but do not see what is really happening to them. I remember when I was studying in secondary school, there were questions raised whether the future teacher will be computerised. Nothing will replace the instructor, but computers have emerged to educational institutions so that Digital Natives could feel at ease in learning. From my own experience there are different kinds of pupils, some of them are very interested in computer-based learning, but some are not. Although the younger the pupils are, the more they engage with computer-based content.
Estonia has taken a huge step towards e-learning, and Tiger Leap Foundation has been a great support for such initiative as for example in our school there are computers in computer class, there are laptops for pupils and probably more to come. Teachers are using laptops in their lessons to save up on paper and books. It is a good time to implement technology, because the local governent has a limited budget for educational institutions.
I personally think that this digital divide is going to end when Digital Natives come to teach, but who knows - maybe something has changed by then.
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