Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

The past few years I have been hearing a lot about neuroplasticity from a couple friends of mine...

Mike co-founded Lumos Labs, a company creating online games and applications for older adults to "reclaim their brains." Using repetitive and scientifically researched digital activities, Lumos Labs hopes to improve memory, attention, speed processing, and cognitive control. Ultimately, games likes these may help to prevent or minimize symptoms of dementia, Alzheimers, etc.

My friend Matt works at FableVision, a multimedia studio and educational publisher in Boston. Basically, they work on educational software applications for classroom use.

FableVision is a founding member of the Constructivist Consortium that "seeks to differentiate member companies and their products from the rest of a cluttered industry." Established in 2007, the Consortium was "created by leading educational technology publishers committed to student empowerment, creative applications of computers and the availability of high-quality open-ended materials."

What is interesting about the Constructivist Consortium's missions is that they are very much in tune with Prensky's articles with perhaps a major difference:
- The learner is at the center of the educational process and knowledge results from socially constructed experiences.
- Computers and communication technology create expanded opportunities for children to learn traditional concepts and additional opportunities to learn new things in new ways.
- Hardware and software are best used in ways that enhance each student’s creative and intellectual development in a flexible open-ended fashion.
- Students are empowered by abundant access to computers and while engaged in personally meaningful projects.
- Teachers are in the best position to know how to meet the needs of their students.
- Opportunities for student collaboration, communication and publishing are at least as important as access to information.
- 21st Century students are creative, thoughtful and capable of responsible leadership in their schools and communities. Student empowerment is a key to academic success.

Their mission strongly incorporates technology on multiple levels, but where this mission differs from Prensky is the Consortium's reliance on and support of teachers - "Teachers are in the best position to know how to meet the needs of their standards. Reflecting more on Prensky, my opinion is more in line with the Consortium.

I think Prensky makes a valid argument about the difference between students of today and the students of the past. But I have two reasons for disagreeing with Prensky's criticism of teachers:
1) Presnky overemphasizes the immigrant status of teachers without acknowledging that a flood of young adults have entered the teaching force - ones that are technologically adept. Much of these young teachers' accents are very faint.

2) What happens in the classroom is not so much a result of an individual teacher's style or lack of ability - but of the resources available to the school as a whole, to the educational methods imparted to the teacher when they were in school, constrained by textbook styles and popular pedagogies.

I think Prensky's views on the new student are for the most part accurate, and I think teaching methods are likely out of date, but Prensky ignores that more and more of our educators are going to be digital natives. I think Prensky is highlighting a transition but not necessarily advocating for change to the appropriate populations.