Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants – A Critical Summary

In ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,’ Marc Prensky highlights an important notion, that he feels educators today are ignoring – the fact that the children they are teaching today have fundamentally changed from the children they were teaching twenty-odd years ago. This change is not a change that occurs with every decade, for example, clothes, slang, music etc… but a fundamental discontinuity. The children of today have been brought up surrounded by digital technology, and therefore they think and process information differently from their predecessors. Prensky therefore believes that it is necessary to change our language and methods in order to teach these children effectively.

Prensky describes the difference between those who have been born into the digital world, and those who have had to adapt to the digital world at a later stage in their lives. He uses the term ‘digital native’ to describe those people brought up surrounded by digital technology. Characteristics of digital natives include the ability to parallel process and multi-task; the preference of hypertext and games; and they thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. In contrast to this, the term ‘digital immigrants’ is used to describe those of us who were born before 1985, and have adopted many aspects of the digital world later in life. Characteristics of ‘digital immigrants’ include, the tendency to work in a linear way; to print off emails; and to bring people physically into your office to show them a website, instead of sending them the URL. Prensky describes these characteristics as ‘the digital immigrant accent,’ and explains that this accent can never fully be lost.

The difference between digital natives and digital immigrants has important repercussions for education. Prensky believes that digital immigrants are having trouble reaching digital natives, because they are not speaking the same language. He insists on the importance of changing our language and teaching methods in order to communicate effectively. It is important to make education as fun and stimulating as the fast moving digital world, or children will simply switch off. If educators want to grab the attention of digital natives, they need to go faster, less step-by-step and with more random access, than what they are traditionally used to. Furthermore, the content of education needs to be changed, in order to combine important fundamentals such as reading, writing, arithmetic etc…, with ‘future’ content such as ethics, politics, sociology, software etc… This will enable the children to flourish in a fast moving technologically advancing world.

Prensky suggests that inventing computer games to teach children even the most serious content, will successfully overcome the problem. We have to accept that children now learn in different ways, and therefore educational computer games will reach digital natives, in ways that the old education system cannot.

Personally, although I agree that the children of today are different due to their digital upbringing, and that it is necessary to change the education system in terms of methods, pace and content, I do not agree with the extent to which Prensky believes ICT should play in education. I think a lot is lost when people only communicate through digital means. If I want to share an interesting website with a friend, I am definitely more likely to show them in person than send them the URL. This may be an embarrassing indicator of my ‘digital immigrant accent,’ but I nonetheless prefer to experience the website together, so that we can share our thoughts and feelings, and participate in personal social interaction - a quality that computers will never be able to replace. With the invention of the telephone, the amount of face to face communication decreased, and then with the invention of e-mail, oral communication decreased, and the intonations and emotions portrayed in voices, was lost. Children who spend more time in front of a computer, than interacting with the world, are less likely to be able to cope in social situations in the future. I am not saying that there are not many advantages to these technological inventions, but I think it is important to limit them in our lives, and to remind ourselves of the most fundamental part of existence – human interaction.