I’m sitting at my kitchen table doing some marking (mid semester marks are due in 2 weeks), and I’m listening to and watching David Warlick in his keynote address to the K12Online Conference (thanks to Dean for the link). I like a lot of what David says, and I respect his thoughtfulness in the field of educational technology. Something is bugging me, however, about the keynote so far. Its not something that David specifically is responsible for instigating, although he and many others (perhaps even me) are guilty of perpetuating - the myth of the digital native.
Perhaps I’m just feeling like a cranky old man because “the big four-oh” is looming in front of me at the end of the month. Perhaps I’m just needing to get this off my chest. I don’t know exactly where this myth came from - I think that Don Tapscott or Mark Prensky may have initiated and incubated it. In his widely cited article Digital Natives Digital Immigrants Prensky describes digital natives thus:
Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive, let me highlight some of the issues. 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. (Does any of this sound familiar?)
It sounds very familiar to me - it is a particularly accurate description of children. I have a couple of them (and some would say my wife has three, but she is far too polite to say such a thing out loud), so I feel qualified to comment on this.
When I watch students working with computers, I don’t see any evidence of digital natives. Their ability to use a computer to create a product - graph, spreadsheet, movie, etc. - is no greater or less that adults. There are undoubtedly some students who are very sophisticated computer users, but as a percentage of the population I would judge that they are equally well represented in the adult population (although I tend to hang out with a particularly geeky crowd given the opportunity). Most students and most adults are quite naive users - they learn simple tasks easily enough, but more complex tasks take more time (although somewhat less with students) and at the end they accomplish these complex tasks by following a series of memorized steps. Quite often the steps they follow are not the most efficient ways of getting the job done, but it does the work. A colleague of mine observed that students don’t really understand the technology any better than most adults, they are just less afraid of making mistakes. They may figure things out on a computer faster, but they are just as likely to be mistaken as an adult.
My concern with the use of this convenient but, I believe, incorrect paradigm of digital natives and digital immigrants. If we project certain qualities and attributes onto our students, instead of learning what they really can do and what they really need to learn, we do them a great disservice by not providing the education (that is, formalized school learning) that they need. We also show great disrespect to them by attributing traits to them instead of coming to know them all as unique and valuable human beings.
Towards the end of his keynote, David suggests that we are learning in new, 21st century ways. I have to disagree and suggest that David (and others) seriously consider these sorts of statements. People are learning in the same way that we always have - mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work. While it is true that the scope of the communities from which we learn has greatly expanded, the way we communicate (that is, the genres of communication) has not changed although the tools used for communicating (that is, the media of communication) have changed. We write personal essays and journals as people did hundreds of years ago, but we publish them online and call them weblogs. Michel de Montaigne was undoubtedly the first a-list blogger. We send e-mail and messages back and forth to each other, but does this represent a qualitative change from written correspondence? Wikis, with their collaborative writing affordances, have always reminded me of the notes scribbled in margins of books which I personally experienced in university - some of the marginalia were actually quite thoughtful and well written. Our audience may now be world wide and the capability to publish may now be open to anyone, but we are still following genres that are well established and predate any so-called digital natives or their digital immigrant parents.
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