Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully
while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants)
can't. Of course not - they didn't practice this skill constantly for
all of their formative years. Digital Immigrants think learning can't
(or shouldn't) be fun. Why should they - they didn't spend their
formative years learning with Sesame Street.
Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in
their classes grew up on the "twitch speed" of video games and MTV. They
are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in
their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant
messaging. They've been networked most or all of their lives. They have
little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and "tell-test"
instruction.
Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they
have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers
when they were students will work for their students now. But that
assumption is no longer valid. Today's learners are different.
"Www.hungry.com" said a kindergarten student recently at lunchtime.
"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 Natives' point of view their
Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying
attention to compared to everything else they experience - and then they
blame them for not paying attention!
And, more and more, they won't take it. "I went to a highly ranked
college where all the professors came from MIT," says a former student.
"But all they did was read from their textbooks. I quit." In the giddy
internet bubble of a only a few months ago - when jobs were plentiful,
especially in the areas where school offered little help - this was a
real possibility. But the dot-com dropouts are now returning to
school. They will have to confront once again the Immigrant/Native
divide, and have even more trouble given their recent experiences. And
that will make it even harder to teach them - and all the Digital
Natives already in the system - in the traditional fashion.
So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn the old
ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators 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."
So unless we want to just forget about educating Digital Natives until
they grow up and do it themselves, we had better confront this issue.
And in so doing we need to reconsider both our methodology and our
content.
First, our methodology. 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.
Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital
"singularity" there are now two kinds of content: "Legacy" content (to
borrow the computer term for old systems) and "Future" content.
"Legacy" content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical
thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc - all of
our "traditional" curriculum. It is of course still important, but it
is from a different era. Some of it (such as logical thinking) will
continue to be important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry)
will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.
"Future" content is to a large extent, not surprisingly, digital and
technological. But while it includes software, hardware, robotics,
nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics,
sociology, languages and other things that go with them. This "Future"
content is extremely interesting to today's students. But how many
Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it? Someone once suggested to
me that kids should only be allowed to use computers in school that they
have built themselves. It's a brilliant idea that is very doable from
the point of view of the students' capabilities. But who could teach
it?
As educators, 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. It's not actually
clear to me which is harder - "learning new stuff" or "learning new ways
to do old stuff." I suspect it's the latter.
(continued in next post)
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