|
Today’s
students – K through college – represent the first
generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent
their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames,
digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other
toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college
grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading,
but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000
hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell
phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.
It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment
and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s
students think and process information fundamentally differently
from their predecessors. These differences go far further and
deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different
kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “
says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall
see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’
brains have physically changed – and are different from
ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not
this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking
patterns have changed. I will get to how they have changed in
a minute.
What should we call these “new” students of today?
Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen.
But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital
Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers”
of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.
So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not
born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our
lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of
the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital
Immigrants. The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital
Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than
others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain,
to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot
in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be
seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information
second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program
rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to
use it. Today’s older folk were "socialized" differently
from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new
language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell
us, goes into a different part of the brain.
There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent.
They include printing out your email (or having your secretary
print it out for you – an even “thicker” accent);
needing to print out a document written on the computer in order
to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen); and bringing
people physically into your office to see an interesting web site
(rather than just sending them the URL). I’m sure you can
think of one or two examples of your own without much effort.
My own favorite example is the “Did you get my email?”
phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and should,
laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”
But this is not just a joke. It’s very serious, because
the single biggest problem facing education today is that 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.
This is obvious to the Digital Natives – school often feels
pretty much as if we’ve brought in a population of heavily
accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often
can’t understand what the Immigrants are saying. What does
“dial” a number mean, anyway?
Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive,
let me highlight some of the issues. Digital Natives are used
to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process
and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather
than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext).
They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification
and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious”
work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)
But Digital Immigrants typically have very little appreciation
for these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected
through years of interaction and practice. These skills are almost
totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned –
and so choose to teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing
at a time, individually, and above all, seriously. “My students
just don’t _____ like they used to,” Digital Immigrant
educators grouse. I can’t get them to ____ or to ____. They
have no appreciation for _____ or _____ . (Fill in the blanks,
there are a wide variety of choices.)
Digital Immigrants don’t believe their students can learn
successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because
they (the Immigrants) can’t. Of course not – they
didn’t practice this skill constantly for all of their formative
years. Digital Immigrants think learning can’t (or shouldn’t)
be fun. Why should they – they didn’t spend their
formative years learning with Sesame Street.
Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting
in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of
video games and MTV. They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext,
downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their
laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging. They’ve
been networked most or all of their lives. They have little patience
for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test”
instruction.
Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as
they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for
the teachers when they were students will work for their students
now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today’s learners
are different. “Www.hungry.com” said a kindergarten
student recently at lunchtime. “Every time I go to school
I have to power down,” complains a high-school student.
Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that
they choose not to? Often from the Natives’ point of view
their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth
paying attention to compared to everything else they experience
– and then they blame them for not paying attention!
And, more and more, they won’t take it. “I went to
a highly ranked college where all the professors came from MIT,”
says a former student. “But all they did was read from their
textbooks. I quit.” In the giddy internet bubble of a only
a short while ago – when jobs were plentiful, especially
in the areas where school offered little help – this was
a real possibility. But the dot-com dropouts are now returning
to school. They will have to confront once again the Immigrant/Native
divide, and have even more trouble given their recent experiences.
And that will make it even harder to teach them – and all
the Digital Natives already in the system – in the traditional
fashion.
So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn
the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn
the new? Unfortunately, no matter how much the Immigrants may
wish it, it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards.
In the first place, it may be impossible – their brains
may already be different. It also flies in the face of everything
we know about cultural migration. Kids born into any new culture
learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the
old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know
about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help
them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants
spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in
the “old country.”
So unless we want to just forget about educating Digital Natives
until they grow up and do it themselves, we had better confront
this issue. And in so doing we need to reconsider both our methodology
and our content.
First, our methodology. Today’s teachers have to learn to
communicate in the language and style of their students. This
doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important,
or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less
step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among
other things. Educators might ask “But how do we teach logic
in this fashion?” While it’s not immediately clear,
we do need to figure it out.
Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital “singularity”
there are now two kinds of content: “Legacy” content
(to borrow the computer term for old systems) and “Future”
content.
“Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic,
logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideas of the
past, etc – all of our “traditional” curriculum.
It is of course still important, but it is from a different era.
Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be important,
but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry) will become less so,
as did Latin and Greek.
“Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly,
digital and technological. But while it includes software, hardware,
robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the
ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go
with them. This “Future” content is extremely interesting
to today’s students. But how many Digital Immigrants are
prepared to teach it? Someone once suggested to me that kids should
only be allowed to use computers in school that they have built
themselves. It’s a brilliant idea that is very doable from
the point of view of the students’ capabilities. But who
could teach it?
As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy
and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives. The
first involves a major translation and change of methodology;
the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking. It’s
not actually clear to me which is harder – “learning
new stuff” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.”
I suspect it’s the latter.
So we have to invent, but not necessarily from scratch. Adapting
materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been
done successfully. My own preference for teaching Digital Natives
is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious
content. After all, it’s an idiom with which most of them
are totally familiar.
Not long ago a group of professors showed up at my company with
new computer-aided design (CAD) software they had developed for
mechanical engineers. Their creation was so much better than what
people were currently using that they had assumed the entire engineering
world would quickly adopt it. But instead they encountered a lot
of resistance, due in large part to the product’s extremely
steep learning curve – the software contained hundreds of
new buttons, options and approaches to master.
Their marketers, however, had a brilliant idea. Observing that
the users of CAD software were almost exclusively male engineers
between 20 and 30, they said “Why not make the learning
into a video game!” So we invented and created for them
a computer game in the “first person shooter” style
of the consumer games Doom and Quake, called The Monkey Wrench
Conspiracy. Its player becomes an intergalactic secret agent who
has to save a space station from an attack by the evil Dr. Monkey
Wrench. The only way to defeat him is to use the CAD software,
which the learner must employ to build tools, fix weapons, and
defeat booby traps. There is one hour of game time, plus 30 “tasks,”
which can take from 15 minutes to several hours depending on one’s
experience level.
Monkey Wrench has been phenomenally successful in getting young
people interested in learning the software. It is widely used
by engineering students around the world, with over 1 million
copies of the game in print in several languages. But while the
game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent, creating
the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors,
who were used to teaching courses that started with “Lesson
1 – the Interface.”
We asked them instead to create a series of graded tasks into
which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors had
made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them
to cut them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that
the learners to do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow
random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed
and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.)
They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They
wanted the traditional pedagogical language of “learning
objectives,” “mastery”, etc. (e.g. “in
this exercise you will learn…”); our goal was to completely
eliminate any language that even smacked of education.
In the end the professors and their staff came through brilliantly,
but because of the large mind-shift required it took them twice
as long as we had expected. As they saw the approach working,
though, the new “Digital Native” methodology became
their model for more and more teaching – both in and out
of games – and their development speed increased dramatically.
Similar rethinking needs to be applied to all subjects at all
levels. Although most attempts at “edutainment” to
date have essentially failed from both the education and entertainment
perspective, we can – and will, I predict – do much
better.
In math, for example, the debate must no longer be about whether
to use calculators and computers – they are a part of the
Digital Natives’ world – but rather how to use them
to instill the things that are useful to have internalized, from
key skills and concepts to the multiplication tables. We should
be focusing on “future math” – approximation,
statistics, binary thinking.
In geography – which is all but ignored these days –
there is no reason that a generation that can memorize over 100
Pokémon characters with all their characteristics, history
and evolution can’t learn the names, populations, capitals
and relationships of all the 181 nations in the world. It just
depends on how it is presented.
We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects,
at all levels, using our students to guide us. The process has
already begun – I know college professors inventing games
for teaching subjects ranging from math to engineering to the
Spanish Inquisition. We need to find ways of publicizing and spreading
their successes.
A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is
“this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn’t
work for ‘my subject.’” Nonsense. This is just
rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include
“thought experiments” where I invite professors and
teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt– on
the spot – to invent a game or other Digital Native method
for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which
the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what
each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students
role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience
the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s
List. It’s just dumb (and lazy) of educators – not
to mention ineffective – to presume that (despite their
traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach,
and that the Digital Natives’ “language” is
not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea.
So if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital
Natives – i.e. all their students – they will have
to change. It’s high time for them to stop their grousing,
and as the Nike motto of the Digital Native generation says, “Just
do it!” They will succeed in the long run – and their
successes will come that much sooner if their administrators support
them.
Coming soon: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 2: The scientific
evidence behind the Digital Native’s thinking changes, and
the evidence that Digital Native-style learning works!
From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October
2001)
© 2001 Marc Prensky
Marc
Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker,
writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of
education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based
Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2001), founder and CEO of Games2train,
a game-based learning company, and founder of The Digital Multiplier,
an organization dedicated to eliminating the digital divide in
learning worldwide. He is also the creator of the sites <www.SocialImpactGames.com>,
<www.DoDGameCommunity.com>
and <www.GamesParentsTeachers.com>
. Marc holds an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in Teaching from
Yale. More of his writings can be found at <www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp>.
Contact Marc at marc@games2train.com.
|