Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

I really enjoyed Marc Prensky's piece on Digital Natives and Digital immigrants. I think he offered a really interesting perspective on learning. He looked at the "Digital Native" students and the way they learn compared to the way "Digital Immigrants" teach. In this article he offered many alternatives to the traditional way of teaching that is more appealing and effective for todays generation of students.

I thought it was particularly interesting when he stated that our generation has spent less than 5,000 hours reading but over 10,000 hours playing games and 20,000+ hours watching television. While I recognize that those numbers vary from student to student I think that Prensky's point is extremely relevant. I agree with him that todays generation has become accustom to immediate results and require more stimulation.

I liked that Prensky did not label the student as the problem but rather the way we are teaching them as becoming more and more ineffective. "Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language." I think that is a really interesting point.

-What I don't understand is why Prensky presents this idea that the whole education system but completely reform to this new way. I think that it is really important to hold firm to some of the old ways of learning. If we completely conform we will have a generation that is solely dependent on technology. Just a thought, what if there came a day where that technology crashed? For instance, in hospitals they have machines that take your blood pressure or your temperature but you still need to know how to manually take someones blood pressure in case those machines fail. Just throwing that out there.

I think my point is that both the Digital Natives and the Digital Immigrants need to come to a compromise. I think that the teachers need to adapt and adopt some of the new technology while holding firm to old but relevant material. On the same token, Digital Natives need to be held responsible for their education and adapt as well.