Week 1 Notebook

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants:  Perhaps in 2001, when we were first beginning to really investigate learning and education in the 21st century vs. previously, this article seemed thoughtful and prescient.  25 years later, it seems off the mark.  I also really dislike arguments that set up false dichotomies like this.  There are several in this article where the author sets up straw men to be provocative — natives vs. immigrants is one.  Another would be "legacy content" vs. "future content," where the author then puts things into these boxes that aren't even remotely similar.  And it's always the case that the younger generation thinks we oldy-oldsters are out of touch, in every venue of life, and "rages against the machine," thinking they know better.  The advent of new technology has always been disruptive, and this article endeavors to catalog some of those disruptions, and certainly, that is appreciated.  In many ways, though, I think it goes in an unfortunate direction.  

I've been in college publishing since all we sold were print books.  The one single problem that college professors have expressed over my several decades in this field is that students don't read.  I'd add to that from this vantage point that IF students read at all, they don't read well.  Reading requires time and effort to follow arguments, understand theories, evaluate evidence, etc.  Digital natives don't want to spend time on this stuff, but NOT really because it's just time-intensive and hard.  I'd argue that the main difference between digital natives' learning and digital immigrants' is that we immigrants don't need an almost constant dopamine hit to drive our efforts.  Natives have grown up in an environment where they can context switch themselves into new environments in an effort to seek out more dopamine.  As a result, they find it challenging to stay the course in an environment where those dopamine hits come less frequently.  That being said, they'll spend HOURS learning a complicated new game, failing over and over again, frustratingly so, but will persevere because the game is designed to produce dopamine-inducing events.  They CAN persevere and do hard things if the task is structured to drive them forward in ways they are familiar with and are rewarding.  So, education has to change to understand this shift.  This article suggests that it is through game-based learning--and yes, that is a really excellent way to teach, and it's been around for a while, even in analog environments!  But it is also VERY expensive to do well in digital environments.  And even in his example, I found his almost disparagement of digital immigrant ways of teaching simply a disconnect between the goal and the people he hired to achieve it.  He asked educators to become game builders.  Is it really surprising that educators had to be brought along in the skills of game building and expectations of gameplay?  I'd argue no.  

RE legacy vs. future content, what the author calls "legacy" isn't content, it's skills!!  You can't extract "reading and writing" from a curriculum--even if you shift the presentation of concepts to a video or the synthesis of that content to a presentation.  Somewhere along the way, a person has to "take notes" and formulate an argument with words.  Yes, we digital immigrants need to find ways to teach and engage these skills in new ways for the digital natives, but learning these skills is crucial.  Reading this article now, 25 years later, I'm quite certain that there is a deep body of literature examining skills. That body of work has taken those skills and mapped them to core competencies for work, and endeavored to argue that acquiring things like critical thinking skills from a CT class, or an ethics and morality class, while seemingly disconnected from the digital age in terms of the content presented, actually allows students to grapple with content and develop skills they'll use across their lives.  And sometimes, doing that "analog" is totally fine.  Until the robot overlords take over, we all still have to work together with other humans.  

Finally, I added zero citations to this blog post in step with the Digital Native article that did similarly.  And do we know which brain structures he was talking about, in terms of how my brain is different from my children's brains?  And what about this notion of digital natives being able to multitask--further research has clearly demonstrated that it is a myth; multitasking leads to us doing several things poorly due to cognitive overload.  I'm being catty, though it is interesting to see where our collective minds were back in 2001.  I feel like the most compelling thing out of this article is the coining of the phrase "digital natives". Aside from that, blerg 😑.