It's all about Prensky!

Having read and commented on the three Prensky articles for ICT DA7, I thought some of the thoughts we both (myself and Prensky) brought to the discussion were interesting. Below I have included the points that I felt compelled to comment on (by Prensky), my comments are in red. Each article can be found in full, by clicking on the title of the article.

(The photo of Marc Prensky is from google images: http://www.k12schoolnetworking.org/2007/images/speakers/Marc_Prensky.jpg)

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

I think this is a really important point to raise. The children of today are not the children of the past, and saying “In my day,” will not change the behaviour and thought process of today’s child. Children through generations have been changing, and finally it is being recognised that they have changed so significantly that we can no longer go back. It is no surprise that the children of today have changed, considering that the world in which they are raised has also changed.

One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back.

In some ways this is true, the launch of the internet and the new millennium signifies a new beginning, we have progressed through apes, cavemen and now the 20th century man is a thing of the past. So far the future has been good to us, the progression has been successful, why fear that it may change now?

“Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine.

It is not only the world that has changed; it is not only the technology that has changed. The actual physical being itself has changed. The brain structure has changed; different information is being presented at earlier ages and in completely new ways. I think it is fascinating that the brain structure has changed, but it is no real surprise.

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.

Why do people so often find it hard to believe something, just because it is not something they would do? I have to have noise in my life all the time, TV, music, something, anything, and sometimes, to others annoyance I will have both on. My brain is often on over drive and I find that if I don’t have something on to “distract” me then I get bored of what I am doing and my mind wanders. I am much more likely to concentrate when I have something else to help occupy my mind, this could be due to the amount of TV etc I have watched since getting older and now a simple task (like reading and commenting on a 6 page article) is not enough, there must be something else and as I type I am moving to the music.

“Every time I go to school I have to power down,”

I have recently seen on the news a section on children under 3 should not be exposed to any TV or video games etc. They believe that the TV etc is constantly moving, panning in and out, changing shots etc, things on TV move so fast, especially when compared to the “real world”. There have been reports that children under 3 exposed to TV and video games will develop attention deficit disorders as real life will be too “slow” for them. I can see to some extent what they are saying, but I believe as with anything in life these days, everything in moderation.

So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new?

It should be both. We shouldn’t loose some of the traditions of the past, for example the hand written word has long since disappeared, yet we still spend hours making children write joined up. This is important, I think we should look on computers as complementing our current life style, and not that it becomes our life, and so we should hang onto as many of the immigrants ideas as we can, but at the same time embrace the natives.

My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. After all, it’s an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.

But do we want them to think of life as a game? I think we should be careful about crossing a line we aren’t sure there is a way back from. We have already begun paying children and young teens to go to school, real life, the real world isn’t a game, part of school life is to prepare them for the real world. Would we be doing that if we taught them life is a video game where you have many lives and many chances?

In geography – which is all but ignored these days – there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100 Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history and evolution can’t learn the names, populations, capitals and relationships of all the 181 nations in the world. It just depends on how it is presented.

This is an essential fact, but how do you present information in a way that children instantly remember it? I have a whole brain full of what my parents and others may consider useless information, but how did it get there? I didn’t set out to take it on board, but I did. If only some of my teachers could have done that…and now here I am to see if I can get it right.


Digital natives, digital immigrants: Do They Really Think Differently?

Although the popular term rewired is somewhat misleading, the overall idea is right—the brain changes and organizes itself differently based on the inputs it receives.

The input the brain receives is definitely changing, even at school, computers are being used more often, teachers have interactive whiteboards etc, let alone those that have the access to computers and video games at home and have more extreme fast paced input.

Scans of brains of people who tapped their fingers in a complicated sequence that they had practiced for weeks showed a larger area of motor cortex becoming activated then when they performed sequences they hadn’t practiced.

So perhaps playing a video game they have been playing all week is actually more “taxing” on the brain than new skills, which we may believe challenge them more.

Several hours a day, five days a week, sharply focused attention—does that remind you of anything? Oh, yes—video games! That is exactly what kids have been doing ever since Pong arrived in 1974.

This is something the children want to do. We must be careful not to put them off, it’s like educational TV programs, you know they are educational and so they immediately become less interesting and appealing. The sooner we start putting meaning behind something normally nonsensical the less appealing it will become.

Children raised with the computer “think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around.”

I know that I have a fully active imagination, I have intense and detailed dreams which I often am unsure as to whether they are true or not. I can be on one train of thought and immediately jump onto something else and then back and then to something else and off I go again. Could this be due to story lines on a show jumping around? You hear the beginning of one storyline and then they move to another, then to an old one and tie it up and then back to the first one. Has my brain now been “re-wired” to work this way as this is what I “feed” my brain on???

“Sure they have short attention spans—for the old ways of learning,” says a professor. Their attention spans are not short for games, for example, or for anything else that actually interests them.

But is it the fact that it is something that interests them alone or is it this rapidly becoming age old argument that the fast action of TV and video games, the intense colours, the control and the flashing lights that attract our attention?

So it generally isn’t that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, it’s that they choose not to.

I think that saying this is showing a lack of understanding, it may be partially due to this, but I think it is also due to a different way of life. Many children have a totally different home life to school life. This isn’t how it used to be. Back in the day children would finish school and then go and do chores, possibly go to work etc, now a days the constantly berated “fat” nation come home and plonk themselves on the sofa watching TV and playing video games. The world has changed but the education hasn’t.

In one key experiment, half the children were shown the program in a room filled with toys. As expected, the group with toys was distracted and watched the show only about 47 percent of the time as opposed to 87 percent in the group without toys. But when the children were tested for how much of the show they remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. “We were led to the conclusion that the 5-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what was for them the most informative part of the program. The strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”

In support of this I remember in my A-Level psychology lessons my teacher said she would allow me to doodle whilst she spoke as she too found that she concentrated better when doing something. Some may find it rude to doodle/colour etc when someone is talking requiring your attention, but I am actually listening better when I am pre-occupied. However, I would be hesitant to try this out with children, although I believe with some it may work, but there would need to be a half waypoint. They would have to meet you half way, make sure they didn’t distract other children and they had to input into the lesson to prove they were still following it and they shouldn’t ask what are we doing when the input is over. Although this would be horrendous to manage, depending on the children.

The trick, though, is to make the learning games compelling enough to actually be used in their place. They must be real games, not just drill with eye-candy, combined creatively with real content.

This is important, the games must still be GAMES in order to continue to occupy the children’s interests. But how to get the curriculum…including the “boring” bits into games….and what about teaching, the children could stay at home and work through a pack of video games, they could loose interest in everything else, and what about those jobs which are less purely based on computers, what would those children do having spent their education on one. Also what about telling children that staring at TV will turn your eyes square? Surely the computer would have a similar affect?

On the one hand, they can choose to ignore their eyes, ears and intuition, pretend the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant issue does not exist, and continue to use their suddenly-much-less-effective traditional methods until they retire and the Digital Natives take over.

What about those immigrants that aren’t choosing to ignore the natives and their new language, but they simply can’t catch up with the amount they are behind? They are so used to teaching the old way and haven’t been introduced to the technology in a friendly easy to pick up way, their brains aren’t wired that way. And when the children you are teaching rapidly are becoming more competent than you it almost seems that they know everything, maybe it is ok to concentrate on what the children don’t know. They will still be learning. The most recent class I was with, their behaviour became increasingly disruptive when on the computers, lessons would become chaotic and the children hyper active, any immigrant may be wise to stay away!!!!


Changing Paradigms

But to today’s kids, none of that is education. To them, education is getting prepared for the future – their future.

How can children be sure of what education is and what is best for them? I am in total support of personalised learning and making things interesting, and enjoying learning but at the same time, adults cannot be sure of what the future holds, and what will be needed, it would be foolish to bend to the whim of the children who have a much more idealistic view of learning, education and the future.

More than anything else, kids today want their education to be, and feel, meaningful, worthwhile, and relevant to the future.

Who knows what the future holds? Technology could come crashing down around our ears and we could rapidly revert back to the stone age, where would our technologically advanced children be then?

What do they want from their schools? The answer, they tell us, is community. Working in groups. Doing projects. Having the opportunity to share their ideas with their peers and hear what their peers have to say. Being challenged. Being asked interesting questions. Being listened to. Being respected.

There has been a huge shift towards group work etc however; this allows some to free load whilst others do the work. In order to responsibly set the children up for the precious future they are so determined to arrive at we need to make sure they are all as well prepared as possible.

Digital technology fits only awkwardly into the old “tell-test” paradigm of education. In that paradigm, you keep your best ideas to yourself, rather than sharing. You don’t go looking up information during a test, because it’s “cheating.” You don’t take other people’s work and use it in new ways because it’s “plagiarism.” You can’t use your cell phone as a lifeline, (like you can do on TV to win a million bucks) because it’s taking “unfair advantage.”

But modern technology fits perfectly with the kids’ twenty-first century educational paradigm, i.e. Find information you think is worthwhile anywhere you can. Share it as early and often as possible. Verify it from multiple sources. Use the tools in your pocket – that’s what they’re there for. Search for meaning through discussion.

I have always wondered why there is such emphasis on tests and levelling, etc in the real world you would never be in a situation where you couldn’t ask someone else and or check in a book, or on the internet etc. So why prepare us for a future we will never encounter, although it could be a case of this is how it was in my day, so this is how it is in your day.

If we’re smart, we’ll give our kids their heads (as we say about horses) to use all their technology and passion to learn, as we steer them in positive directions and truly enjoy the ride.

This is a key statement to take from Prensky’s work, but we must remember that we are part of the learning process and that maybe computer games are not the way of the future, in replacement of good old fashioned teaching, the verdict is still out.