Here is an image of a mind map
created to show the differences between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.
Digital Immigrant teachers are the person who were born before the digital world but have at some later point in our lives.
Digital Native students are the people who are all “native
speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.
There are many differences between digital immigrant teachers and digital native students:
Digital Immigrants teachers typically have
very little appreciation for these new skills that the Natives have acquired
and perfected through years of interaction and practice. The skills are almost
totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned – and so choose to
teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all,
seriously.
Digital Natives students 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, and 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.
The “digital immigrant accent” can be used to 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.
The Examples of the digital immigrant
accent 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). My own favorite example is
the “Did you get my email?” phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants
can, and should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”
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outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a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. This is obvious to the Digital
Natives – school often feels pretty much as if we've brought in a population of
heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often can't
understand what the Immigrants are saying.
I prefer the second choice, the digital
immigrants learn the new way because today's learners are difference. They are
no longer like the teachers when they were students. 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. Not-so-smart
(or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how
good things were in the “old country.”
There
should be some improvement:
First, our methodology. Today's teachers have to learn to
communicate in the language and style of their students.
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.
So we have to invent, but not necessarily from
scratch. Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been
done successfully.
For example:
In math, the debate must no longer be about
whether to use calculators and computers . They are a part of the Digital
Natives world . But rather how to use them to instill the things that are
useful to have internalized, from key skills and concepts to the multiplication
tables. We should be focusing on "future math" approximation,
statistics, binary thinking.
We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all
subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us. The process
has already begun I know college professors inventing games for teaching
subjects ranging from math to engineering to the Spanish Inquisition. We need
to find ways of publicizing and spreading their successes.
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