Digital Natives, Digital Immigrant

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
by Marc Prensky

In Prensky's article he discusses how the new generation of children are unlike any generation of children before. Today's generation is a digital generation "that have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age". Prensky coins the people of older generations who are trying to learn the new digital technologies as "digital immigrants". These "digital immigrants" have a different accent then the digital natives and this causes problems because the skills that the digital natives possess are still foreign to the digital immigrants. The digital immigrants are slower and do tasks step-by-step which causes the digital native to lose interest. Prensky says that "the biggest problem facing education today is that our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". He suggests that digital immigrant teachers should abandon their traditional ways of teaching and adopt to teaching methods that better suit digital natives. He argues that digital natives learn differently then digital immigrants did because their brains are different. Todays students have a different thinking pattern then digital immigrants. He argues that the old way of memorization and learning new facts with just a paper and pencil is not a sufficient way of learning for digital natives. He suggests teaching digital natives through the use of video games. He argues the success that has been proven through the use of computer aided software.

I think that using video games is a great and fun way to teach people new things. It only raises one question: What happens when you are a faced with a situation in which you are not able to turn something into a video game. Are we not going to be able to learn it?