Digital Natives and Digital Naivete

Poor Marc Prensky.

In third grade, I worked on typing alongside penmanship and spelling. My school's computers were far from the state of the art, not to mention that at home, we always seemed to lag about five years behind the times technologically, but I was aware of what was out there because of my peers and the media, even if I could not afford the latest gadgets. I guess that makes me a digital native.

I feel that, after a certain point, the Marc Prensky's of the world need to take it easy. There is simply too much technology for even our digital natives to master.

My third-grade students explained the basic idea of an SD card to me (I had read of it in my Wii manual), but then I took that knowledge quickly beyond what they could do with it or knew how to do, because I had more applications for the technology in my life.

I know uses for digital cameras that many people struggle with because I learned their equivalent functions on an archaic piece of equipment called an SLR, back when we used film.

I embrace the digital camera as an advance, though I typically cannot get the same quality images out of the ones in my price range as I could out of a comparable film camera. Both my digital camera and my SLR cost about the same amount. My digital camera is a glorified point-and-shoot camera, while my SLR was adaptable.

I digress.

My first beef with Prensky is that he seems to suffer under the delusion that, at some point in the past, students were ever or could ever have been "little versions of us." There is a gulf fixed between "us" and the next generation, and technology is only one measure of that gulf.

And it is an inadequate measure of that gulf. When my cell phone, computer, or other device is ancient after 1-2 years, I would dispute that the progress is always so significant that I could not pick up the new iPod or new Windows or new Mac computer and catch on with ease.

If there is a "digital immigrant" community, I believe it is much larger than Prensky supposes. There are those many who produce the technology that we use, and this group is growing sizeably, perhaps exponentially. Nonetheless, those that use technology are always guests to someone else's world. Digital immigrants include all of our students until they start producing technology with broad impact themselves.

Regular immigrants, the kind that come into a new country from an old country, might, as my great grandparents did, declare that they are "American" now and no longer Swedish or Polish. They adopt the language of the land, they live and work in the society of the land. They have families, they die on this soil and are burried in it.

What more do you need to do to gain "native" status.

We live in a digital era and society. True hermits and isolationists are hard to come by these days. Either we are all of us digital natives, or only those that produce the technology are (assuming that they grasp what it is that they are doing).