Digital natives and immigrants

Perhaps the most misunderstood and least appreciated notion among those who design and deliver education today is the fact that our students have radically changed. A really big discontinuity has occurred: the arrival and rapid spread of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. The numbers are overwhelming: more than 10,000 hours playing video games, more than 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; more than 20,000 hours of TV viewing (a high percentage of high-speed MTV), more than 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 500,000 commercials viewed, all before today’s kids leave college. And maybe 5,000 hours of book reading at most.

As a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of your interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently than their predecessors. “Different types of experiences lead to different brain structures,” says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine.

Today’s students are Digital Natives. They are “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 came to it later in life are, by comparison, Digital Immigrants. And since we Digital Immigrants learn -like all immigrants, some better than others- to adapt to their environment, we always retain, to a certain extent, an “accent”, that is, our foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as searching the Internet for information second instead of first; in reading the manual of a program instead of assuming that the program itself will teach us how to use it; printing our emails (or having our secretary print them for us, an even “thicker” accent); or never change the original ring of our cell phone. Those of us who are digital immigrants can and should laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”

But this is not just a joke. It is very serious, because the biggest problem facing education today is that our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an obsolete language (that of the pre-digital era), are struggling to teach a population that speaks a completely new.

Digital natives are used to receiving information very quickly. They like parallel processing and multitasking. They prefer your graphics over your text rather than the other way around. They prefer random access (such as hypertext). They work best when they are networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work.

Digital immigrant instructors often have little appreciation for these new skills that natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice. These skills are almost entirely foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned – and therefore chose to teach – slowly, step by step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, earnestly.

Digital immigrant teachers generally assume that students are the same as always and that the same methods that worked for teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today’s students are different.

The people sitting in his classes grew up with the “speed twitch” of video games and MTV. They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, broadcast messages and instant messaging. They have been online for most or all of their lives. They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell and prove” instruction.

So, is it that digital natives can’t pay attention or 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: “Every time I go to school, I have to turn off” , a student complains, and then blames them. for not paying attention! And, increasingly, digital natives do not accept it.

So what should happen? Should we force digital native students to learn the old ways, or should their digital immigrant educators learn the new? Unfortunately, as much as the Immigrants may want it, the Digital Natives are highly unlikely to back down. First of all, it may be impossible: their brains may already be different. It also goes against everything we know about cultural migration. Children born into any new culture learn the new language easily and strongly resist using the old one. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know their new world and take advantage of their children to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time complaining about how good things were in the “old country.”

So unless we want to forget about educating digital natives until they grow up and do it themselves, digital immigrants had better tackle this problem. It’s time to stop complaining and, as Nike’s motto of the digital native generation goes: “Just do it!” If you don’t know how to do it, watch your kids!