Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

Marc Prensky wrote an article in October 2001 entitled “Digital natives, digital immigrants”. He is a writer, consultant and inventor in the areas of education and learning and is also the author of “Digital Game-based Learning (2001)”. He has a master’s degree from Yale University, Middlebury College and Harvard Business School. I thought that it would be useful to summarise some excerpts from this article where he talks about today’s students and how we as educators should be looking at ways to bridge the gap between their learning styles and the type of education we are imposing upon them.

According to Prensky, today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. Today’s students represent the first generation to grow up with new technology. They spend their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones and all the other toys and tools of a digital age. As a result, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. One can call the students of today “Digital Natives” whereas the rest of us, who were not born into the digital world but have adopted many aspects of the new technology, can be called “Digital Immigrants”. (Prensky, 2011)

The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age) are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. The students in classrooms have grown up on the “twitch speed” of video games and TV. (Prensky, 2011)

They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, cell phones, a library on their laptops, beamed messaging and instant messaging. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5000 hours of their lives reading, over 10 000 hours playing video games and a further 20 000 hours watching TV. Computer games, email, the internet, cell phones and instant messaging are part of their daily lives. (Prensky, 2011)

They have been networked for most of their lives. They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic. Clearly today’s learners are different. “Every time I go to school I have to power down”, complains a high-school student. Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to? Often from the Native’s point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared with everything else they experience – and then they blame them for not paying attention! We need to reconsider both our methodology and our content. (Prensky, 2011)

In Maths for example the debate must no longer be about whether to use calculators or computers – they are a part of the Digital Native’s world – but rather how to use them to instil the things that are useful to have internalised from key skills and concepts to multiplication tables. (Prensky, 2011)

If Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have to change and despite possible grumbling and reservations, they will succeed in the long run and their successes will come just that much sooner if their administrators support them (Prensky, 2011)

 Bibliography Prensky, M., 2011. The Digital Divide. London: Penguin.