DIGITAL NATIVES DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS

DIGITAL NATIVES & DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS

• Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

• Singularity: dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20 th century.

INTRODUCTION • Discontinuity: thinking patterns have changed.

HOW SHOULD WE CALL THESE “NEW STUDENTS” OF TODAY ? N-[for Net]-gen D-[for Digital]-gen • Digital Natives X Digital Immigrants

DIGITAL NATIVES X DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS • Answer these questions to yourselves: • 01 – Do you usually turn to the internet for information second rather than first? • 02 – Do you read the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach you how to use it? • 03 – Do you sometimes print out your email or even a document written on the computer in order to edit it ? • 04 – Do you sometimes bring people into your office to see an interesting website ? • 05 - Have you ever phoned someone to ask if they had received your email ?

DIGITAL NATIVES X DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS • A big problem facing education: digital immigrant instructors are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language whereas digital natives are being brought up in a population of heavily accented unintelligible foreigners to teach them.

DIGITAL NATIVES • are used to receiving information really fast; • like parallel process and multi-task; • prefer their graphics before their texts; • function best when networked; • thrive on instant gratification and instant rewards; • prefer games to serious work.

DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS • have very little appreciation for these new skills that natives have acquired through years of interaction and practice; • don’t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music; • think that learning can’t be fun; • assume that the same methods used to teach them in the past will work for their students now.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN? • Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? • Kids Born into any new culture, learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. • We need to reconsider both our methodology and our content.

METHODOLOGY AND CONTENT • First, our methodology. • Second, our content. Two kinds: • “Legacy” content includes reading, writing , arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc. – all of our traditional curriculum. • “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.

digital immigrant way IS NOT the only way

educators have to CHANGE

JUST DO IT. AND YOU WILL SUCCEED.

SOURCES • Aducci, Romina et al. (2008), "The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!", An IDC Whitepaper sponsored by Nortel, May 2008 • Shah Nishant and Sunil Abraham, Digital Natives with a Cause? (2009) available online • My Keynote "Coaching Digital Natives", 2008 (published March 2008) • Lusoli, Wainer & Miltgen, Caroline (2009), "Young People and Emerging Digital Services. An Exploratory Survey on Motivations, Perceptions and Acceptance of Risks", JRC Scientific and Technical Reports (Sevilla: EC JRC IPTS) (no. EUR 23765 EN), March 2009, doi: 10. 2791/68925