Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants By Marc Prensky

    Now, the students have changed and they are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

-Who are Digital Immigrant teachers and Digital Native students as categorized by the author?

 The most useful designation Marc Prensky has found the new students is Digital Natives students, and these students are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.
 Digital Native students have spent their lives by and using computers, videogames, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.
Digital Immigrants are not born into the digital world but at some later point in their lives became fascinated by and adopted many aspects of the new technology. Immigrant teachers learn like all immigrants, some better than other and they were socialized differently from their kids, and they are new in process of learning a new language.

-  List down 3 differences between Digital Immigrant teachers and Digital Native students?
 
Digital Native students are used to receiving information really fast, and they like to parallel process and multi-task. Also, they prefer their graphics before their text, and they prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked, and they prefer games to serious work. But Digital Immigrants are different in some points. They choose to teach- slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously. Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music because the immigrants can't. Also, they think learning can't be fun.

-What is meant by Digital immigrant accent? List down three examples of “digital immigrant accents.”
 It is a language that used in Digital Immigrants' lives in the past.
The "Digital Immigrants accent" can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than the first, or in reading the manual for program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrants 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). 

-According to the author, what is the biggest serious problem facing education today?

The 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.

 

-     “Should the Digital Natives learn the old way, or should their Digital Immigrants learn the new?”

Unfortunately, no matter how much the Immigrants may wish it, it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards. In the first place, it may be impossible – their brains may already be different.  It also flies in the face of everything we know about cultural migration. 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.”

- What should the Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives?

If Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives – i.e. all their
students – they will have to change.  It's high time for them to stop their grousing, and as the Nike motto of the Digital Native generation says, “Just do it!”  They will succeed in the long run – and their successes will come that much sooner if their administrators support them. Today's teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things.  Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic in this fashion?”  While it's not immediately clear, we do need to figure it out. We need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives. The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking.