"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky

"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky



This article was very interesting to me because I've never really thought about the educational system and how it should be changing. The author brings up many good points in this article. I thought it was very clever of him to come up with the terms "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants" to represent past generations and today's generation. Technology really is like learning another language to people who know nothing about it. Going a little off track, this article reminds me of when my parents finally both got a cell phone and I how I taught them to text and it took them awhile to get the hang of it, but now they text me all of the time. I think the main point the author is trying to make is that the biggest problem facing education today is "Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language."



Another thing that caught my eye in this article was how it mentioned that Digital Natives like to parallel process and multi-task and the Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music because they (the Immigrants) can't. I don't really agree with either of these. I think it depends on the person and how each individual thinks and learns. I know a lot of people who can sit in front of the TV and get their homework done just as fast as if they were sitting alone in a room with no noise. I, on the other hand can't do that. If I were to sit in front of the TV or try and listen to music while I'm trying to do homework it would take me about three times as long to get it done because I always find myself either getting sucked into whatever I'm watching; or singing along with the music I'm listening to and I get to distracted.

An example the author used was the Monkey Wrench Conspiracy which was a computer game made so that the mechanical engineers could learn the new Computer-Aided design (CAD) system easier and more fun. This marketing technique proved to be very effective and now it's used by engineering students all over the world.