Is Prensky the academic equivalent of Kyle Sandilands the shock jock? Sensationalist? One-dimensional? Biased? Or is code the new Latin? Is programming the next literacy?
Talkback radio presenters tend to be ‘like or loathe’ personalities. They know that to increase their ratings, they need to engage or enrage. Spout a provoking or emotional headline and watch the phone-lines light up. As we’re bombarded by a multitude of sound bites, blanket press coverage and political spin, we realise that this is the way of the present. Blame ICTs. No sooner has something outrageous been said then it’s been published to millions. So why do we bother with these tit-bits, knowing full well they’re often inflammatory remarks delivered solely to grab attention? Perhaps it’s as James McKenzie Ed.D, Editor of From Now On - The Educational Technology Journal says “simple-minded thinking is often attractive”.
I like the concept of pitting academic against academic in a bout of intellectual sparing, as per the Cerebrum debate on the Dana Foundation website when Howard Gardner and James Traub debated the concept of multiple intelligences. It’s like a pre-election TV debate. But perhaps to be more engaging with today’s ICT-savvy youth, such debate could be made more in the style of an academic “Celebrity Deathmatch”?
Despite Prensky’s obvious qualifications and experience, it’s easy to dismiss his headline-grabbing ranting. But, as an aside, he did what he set out to do. His Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (On the Horizon, 2001) paper sparked a huge debate, as well as the adoption of these labels into the ICT nomenclature.
So why so easy to dismiss, but for the ensuing clamour? “His stereotypes and sweeping comments seem fabricated through personal observations, strong bias and wishful thinking…His casual language signals sloppy research and thinking. Arcade scholarship. Hip. Clever. Glib. Wrong” McKenzie, 2007, “Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions and Digital Deprivation”. It would be great to see him in the Celebratory Deathmatch ring with Prensky. Unfortunately, he is open to the same criticism as Prensky, descending into a diatribe from what started off as a strong and well-reasoned critique.
So what was Prensky (2001) actually saying? He suggested that a “really big discontinuity” had taken place. Not the most academic or precise wording. Like most of what Prensky has to say, I disagree with his generalisations, and the basic assumption that there has been anything so singular about the recent developments in technology that impact on education, or society as a whole. Imagine Prensky writing about the invention of the printing press, let alone the wheel or sliced bread. He is right in saying there is no going back from this technological development (even Hitler would find it hard to burn all the “books” of information now available on the world wide web), but who knows when next irreversible leap in technology will come. Wasn’t it ever thus? To me it’s simply an inevitable progression in ways of learning, as has been forever. How long will it be before we accept Matrix-style brain downloads as the next pedagogy?
Prensky does not seem to see the value of immigrants that I do. Aside from their wonderful cuisine (with the possible exception of the English) my experience is that they evidence a hunger to learn, to understand and to fit in, but without losing their colour, absorbed from a variety of backgrounds and different perspectives. If “Digital Natives” have never experienced anything else, perhaps they would better be labelled “Digital Rednecks”? Sure, they may have driven a Super Mario Cart through a jungle, but have they ever gone on a walk through the rain forest, heard the birds, the insects, the silence; smelt the rain, the moss, the foliage; breathed the humidity?
“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” Prensky says. ’Twas ever thus, I say, whether the teachers spoke Latin, or simply spoke “the Queen’s English”, rather than slang. Simply enunciating nowadays is “speakin’ posh, innit?”. Prensky is surprised that the youth of the new millennium “prefer games to ‘serious’ work”. Perhaps a feigned surprise, or is he really that blinkered?
More ‘shoot from the hip stereotyping’: “Digital Immigrants think learning can’t (or shouldn’t) be fun”, [Now where did I put that tar-brush? Prensky is a Digital Immigrant himself, yet sets himself up as the keeper of the Holy Grail of future learning – more on that below] whereas Digital Natives “have little patience for lectures” and step-by-step logic. I’m two weeks in to my GDLT and already appear to know more than Prensky displays. Surely it depends on one’s preferred learning style? Or is the suggestion that no one born after the iPod can be a sequential learner?
Prensky asks “should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new?”. Rather obviously, the answer is to go forwards, but with a mind to all we’ve learnt from the past.
Prensky’s Holy Grail is computer games. Why? Does Prensky make his living as an academic? No. He is the founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning company. Talk about having a vested interest. Blinkered? He’s gone “all in” on computer games being the only way to learn. Certainly I’d agree that they are one tool in the pedagogical toolbox, but if games were the only way to learn surely in the 10 years passed Prensky’s ideas would have been adopted and he would be a Nobel Prize winner, CEO of Fortune 500’s top company and on Forbes’ Rich List (as well as on Oprah)? Whilst flight simulators, for example, are a valuable tool for learning, would you want to be in a ‘plane piloted by a 13 year old whose only ‘flight experience’ was “Ace Combat IV: Shattered Skies”?
McKenzie is not a big Prensky fan, claiming the latter “makes grandiose claims entirely unsubstantiated with any evidence. He presents no data or studies to back up a central thesis of his paper. He quotes Dr. Perry out of context and without citing which article or study he has in mind. He makes it seem like Perry is supporting his claim that growing up digitally will change the brains of the young”. McKenzie doesn’t mince his words. He points out that Perry’s work focused on trauma, not digital experience.
“To help…traumatized children, we need to understand how the brain responds to threat, how it stores traumatic memories and how it is altered by the traumatic experience. Yes, altered. All experience changes the brain – good experiences like piano lessons and bad experiences like living through a tornado as it destroys your home. This is so because the brain is designed to change in response to patterned, repetitive stimulation. And the stimulation associated with fear and trauma changes the brain”.
Naughty, naughty, Mr Prensky.
But look at us. We’re a GDLT class of 100, still debating (and blogging about) Prensky, over a decade later. He wrote another, perhaps more inflammatory (but less ground-breaking) article in EDUCAUSE review, 2005, ““Engage Me or Enrage Me”. What Today’s Learners Demand”. It starts off innocuously and agreeably enough, with the no-brainer suggestion that there are different types of students: those truly self-motivated; those who go through the motions (who learned to ‘play school’) and finally those who “tune out… who truly resent their time being wasted”. Once again, ‘twas ever thus, I say. But with his usual lack of reference or supporting statistical evidence, he goes on to state that this latter “group is quickly becoming the majority”.
I have no doubt that this section of students exists and always has done. He claims a large percentage of students prefer playing video games to studying (shock, horror), but are these modern games that different to traditional playground games, or sports that have always been preferred to the drudgery of study? He argues that whilst these students get bored easily in schools, “they certainly don’t have short attention spans for their [video] games”. Prensky seems to believe that these games are perennially engaging, but who plays the top three games of 2005 nowadays? It is hard to imagine a video game with the longevity of the games of, say, football or cricket.
I’m not alone in my reaction to Prensky. He has engaged and enraged many academics, including those in our suggested reading Margaryan and Littlejohn (2008) and Thrupp (2009). As I say, Prensky did his job. He provoked reaction, publicity (and no doubt an increase in his games’ company's coffers), but he also provoked reasoned, substantiated, researched responses. One difficulty in all the discussions of modern technologies and trends is simply how quickly technology and its use is growing. By the time a research project has been organised and completed, it’s out of date. Margaryan and Littlejohn’s “Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning” was published three years after Prensky’s 2005 article. One might have assumed a huge increased use of ICTs, however, they suggested “that students use a limited range of technologies for both learning and socialisation”. But again, that was another three years ago.
It’s interesting to note that when Prensky’s “Digital Natives Digital Immigrants” was published there were 101 nations in the world. Now there are 195 (192 Members of UN, plus Vatican City, Kosovo and Taiwan, excluding Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Greenland, Palestine, Western Sahara, and even the components of the United Kingdom (such as Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England – as they're not fully independent countries, states, or nation-states).
Perhaps more interesting, or at least relevant to this discussion on social and other technologies, is the exponential growth in the “population” of active Facebook users. Facebook was only started in 2004, was only in use for high schools by 2005 and was only opened up to anyone over the age of 13 in 2006. At the time of “Are digital natives a myth or reality?..” (2008), Facebook’s populationYour mates know what you did last night before you’ve even recovered from your hangover, courtesy of Facebook or Twitter. was ‘only’ 100 million (‘only’ five times the total population of Australia). As at January 2011 it was 600 million, having doubled in the last 15 months. That’s twice population of USA, making Facebook the third largest country in the world (behind China and India and they count under 13 year olds too). I would doubt that Margaryan and Littlejohn’s findings would still “point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies” or little “evidence to support the claims regarding students adopting radically different patterns of knowledge…sharing”, if their research was repeated today.
These articles add to the overall ITC learning design debate. “[W]ithout changes in pedagogy universities will not succeed in producing independent, self-regulated learners who are able to take control of their own learning and who will be able to participate productively in the world” and yes, ITCs are tools not to be overlooked in modern pedagogy, particularly, as Thrupp states in “ICT Created Diversity In The Classroom: The Contemporary Learner”, “the challenge for teachers is the construction of a learning environment recognisable to and comfortable for as many learners as possible”, whilst acknowledging the many sources of diversity amongst learners.
“Race/ethnicity, language, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status are among the factors that influence the knowledge and experience children bring to the classroom. This diversity offers richness and opportunities in the classroom, and it also affects the kinds of support children need to learn”, per Duschl, Schweingruber & Shouse, Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007). Indeed, with access to ICTs being, at least in part, financial, this places even more of a spotlight on the socio-economic factor, with some learners having less access than others, “suggesting that the diversity of learners in the classroom is increased by ICT use in social groups” (Thrupp 2010). “Children use ICT as a means to engage in interactions and activities in which they want to engage, these being largely determined by their ICT-related social groups” (Thrupp, 2007). Consequently, she suggests that social groups, not ICTs themselves determine the use of ICTs - even more argument against “a singular claim about all learners, because they were born at a certain time [being] neither possible nor helpful”.
Margaryan and Littlejohn state the obvious almost as well as Prenksy: “there is some evidence that younger students use some tools more actively than the older students”, and no doubt vice versa. Diversity in the classroom? Who’d imagine? However they seem to ask a lot when they conclude that “neither of these two groups uses these technologies to support their learning effectively”. Should they be expected to, if the educators are not leading the way? After all, they conclude that “students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the approaches adopted by their lecturers”. Again, no surprises there. Is there a competition on to state the obvious? Of course students’ learning is influenced by their teachers’ approach.
As Sir Ken Robinson, in his entertaining 2006 TED lecture, explains, modern education systems have been designed by educators, i.e. academics, “in their image, on their values and definitions of intelligence”. He advances that education is linear and industrial, designed to lead us from one step to another, to achieve academic success. For what? To get to college. For what? For more linear education? For what? To get jobs, as university academics (“who live in their heads, not the real world”).
It used to be that you needed a nicely typed CV and a pleasant cover letter (in your own handwriting), in order to get a job. Imagine if you applied for a job with Google in black text on white print, on paper, no less. You’d be laughed at and your application binned. It is not uncommon to submit your (existing/long-standing) Blog as a résumé nowadays. What about “the best job in the world”? $150,000 for six months care-taking a tropical island?
Applications to Tourism Queensland via a 60 second video only were permitted. As Margaryan and Littlejohn query: how well are universities “preparing students for employment if they…dismiss [ICT] tools and more importantly the processes and philosophies of learning and collective knowledge creation underpinning these tools”?
Applications to Tourism Queensland via a 60 second video only were permitted. As Margaryan and Littlejohn query: how well are universities “preparing students for employment if they…dismiss [ICT] tools and more importantly the processes and philosophies of learning and collective knowledge creation underpinning these tools”?
But back to Prensky. As I said at the top, it’s easy to dismiss his headline-grabbing ranting, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. In his 2008 article Programming Is the New Literacy, discussing whether HTML programming ought to be taught in schools, Prensky answers the posed question “Can't the people who need programming just buy it?”. “No doubt, but isn’t this a backward step?”, he asks, recalling the days of the scribes hired to write communiqués at one end, and another hired again by the recipient who can’t read them without a scribe at the other end. Is code the new Latin? Is programming the next literacy?
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