mauricio´s suggestions on task 3 -- Group THREE - 2011 CEI course

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Date Posted: 10:25:27 03/14/11 Mon
Author: Mauricio Horto
Subject: mauricio´s suggestions on task 3

hi, this is my suggestion on task 3. I have send you, by personal e-mail, a doc file showing exactly which pieces i´ve changed.

People who are native in the digital language are called Digital Natives. They can also be called Millennials, Generation Yers or Generation Y. They are generally born from 1987 on (but it’s not a rule). “For them technology is more than a tool, it is a central component of everyday life that frames the world view.” The Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, are the ones who are still trying to arrive at this land of digital technology. Nowadays, most of them are in their thirties and were born in the Generation X. For this reason many teachers are from this generation.
The Digital Natives spend 12.2 hours online every week, according to Forest Research (2006). Some other features of them are: sending instant messages (instead of calling); reading blogs; using social network sites like MySpace and Facebook; doing something instead of knowing it better (the ability of getting things done is more valued than the accumulation of knowledge); and being multitask (do many things at the same time) etc. A video on Youtube, called Grown up digital.mov expresses in a good sense the Net Generation characteristics: freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation.
When studying in a classroom, these types of students listen to music, use the cell phone and pay attention to the teacher at the same time. We, teachers, that are most of the time Digital Immigrants, cannot understand that. We wonder: “are these students really paying attention to us? Are these students really learning what is being taught?”
It is undeniable that Digital Natives prefer to receive information very rapidly, as Tracy L. Gibson says. They are multiprocessing information while using email, instant messaging, and using the phone (or listening to music). The brain of a student of this generation works differently since he has different kinds of experiences. Digital natives have particular learning preferences or styles that differ from earlier generation of students as a result of their upbringing and experiences with technology; in addition their learning path or pace is also different as stated by Marc Prensky (2001):
“They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library in their laptops, beamed messages, and instant messaging.” (p.3) the author goes on saying that “They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and ‘tell-test’ instruction.”
Many researches are being made in order to reach a new understanding of the way this generation is learning and to analyze the quality of this learning process. So far there is not any conclusion about that, but according to Paul Kirsche:
“Our study, and other previous work, suggests that while people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is, it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes… we should resist the fashionable views of educational gurus that children can multi-task, and that we should adapt out education systems accordingly to keep up with the times.”
As stated in PRENSKY (2001), teachers need to reconsider their methodology and their content. About changing the methodology, teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students: going faster and less step-by-step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things. These are indeed some challenges for us, teachers, who are used to explain everything in a logical way since we think the students will only understand in this manner. In fact, students understand things better with a random access because they face it on the Internet all the time. The content change, by its turn, refers to the contents that are taught. According to PRENSKY (2001) we have to teach the “Legacy” content and the “Future” content. The former includes “normal” contents, like reading, writing etc; the latter includes software, hardware, robotics, genomics, ethics, politics, sociology, languages etc. All of these points constitute defiance, considering that teachers tend to think that the less information we give at a time, the more students will “assimilate” the contents.
Indeed, there is this new kind of people and this new generation is quite different from the Digital Immigrants’ generation. Consequently, teachers should be aware of this difference and increase efforts in order to reach students in a better way. However this cannot be done simply as an obligation. As shown by the video “Digital Natives vs Digital Immigrants: Implications for the Classroom on Youtube” immigrant teachers should try to use different approaches for it is well known that it will be better for the students and will motivate them much more.
“It’s very serious, because 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”. (PRENSKY, 2001, p. 2).
In summary, PRENSKY is right when he says that the role of the teacher is not to be a master at all the new technologies but to know about the technologies and how they can be adopted into the curriculum. It is the student job to do the work and produce things from/with these technologies and media. Creating new learning experiences, teachers have to show students that the learning process can be as interesting and connected to their reality as the virtual world that they are inserted on. “The twenty-first century is all about creating, inventing, and sharing those things with an increasingly connected world” (Prensky, 2005). It will take the digital natives and the digital immigrants coming together to find different ways and create new procedures to a better relation between students and teachers.

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