Digital Natives

Prensky's article on digital natives has a lot of very good points. Younger people and many students today are digital natives in the sense that they are willing to pick up new technology and learn it quickly through use and trial and error. I know I function in this manner when learning to use new programs.

Even during the Sibelius unit of music tech class, I experienced some of the frustrations that Prensky notes. The detailed and laborious step by step instructions provided by the textbook took a long time to read, were slow, and were overly thorough. The program is designed to be as intuitive as possible, and so for me, the best way to learn was simply by looking at the desired products on the first page of each chapter and replicating them as exactly as possible using what I could immediately understand about the program from looking at the interface. For the things that I couldn't immediately figure out, the necessary resource was not a step by step guide but rather a searchable index. In this case, it was the index of the textbook, though a digital index would have been better due to ease of searching. Thinking about it, I learned programming for my Java class in basically the same way: starting with a goal and whatever understanding I already had and adding to it in small pieces from an index as needed, not going through commands in a systematic step by step order.

Prensky also makes another good point: educators often make a grand show of using the latest and greatest technology to simply teach the same material in the same traditional manner, while they neglect small and simple things that would aid digital natives. For math, posting linked examples, homework sets, and theorems online would be a huge boon. It would allow students to sift through a network and quickly find and focus on the exact material they need instead of wasting time and energy slogging through a traditional systematic textbook.

I'm not sure that I agree with Prensky though that all the burden of change is on digital immigrants. There are many old ideas and works presented in traditional manners that still have value. In history and classic literature, one is dealing with old source material, and no matter what supplementary materials are used, one can't understand a book without reading it or history without examining the documents and artifacts. The same goes for Prensky's idea of creating a game about classical philosophy. It's all well and good, but at some point, the students have to read the words of the philosophers themselves, who generally present their ideas in a traditional manner.

The new ideas are worth embracing, but many old ideas will continue to have value(even Euclidean Geometry, that one was a real head scratcher) and shouldn't simply be thrown away because they don't immediate conform to the sensibilities of digital natives.