First Article

“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” On the Horizon 9.5 (Oct. 2001)
“Do They Really Think Differently?” On the Horizon 9.6 (Dec. 2001)
by Marc Prensky

A number of other authors credit Marc Prensky with coining the widely used term “digital native” and, slightly less well-known, “digital immigrant.” Prensky is a speaker, writer, consultant, teacher, and designer of “software games for learning, including the world’s first fast-action videogame-based training tools and world-wide, multi-player, multi-team on-line competitions” (www.marcprensky.com). In this two-part article, he argues that “our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (1). Not only does he claim that today’s students “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” but that their digital upbringing may have physically changed their brains. As “native” speakers of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet, they require entirely new teaching methods from their “immigrant” teachers; in fact, he suggests, the two can barely communicate with each other until the immigrants learn the language. 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” (2).

Some of these characteristics certainly resonate with our readings: Weinberger described how random access has revolutionized not only the ways we order knowledge but the ways we create knowledge and the knowledge that gets created. Benkler and Chun emphasized the fundamental shifts—in the market, our understanding and enacting of freedom, etc.—caused by networking. Gee, Bogost, McGonigal, and others wrote about learning through games (Prensky calls this “edutainment”).

The ideas in these articles are pretty old hat by now (7 years later), due in part to this and other work by Prensky, but his conviction that “natives” are essentially and radically different and his zeal for educational reform are still notable: “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” (6). See next article for a response and troubling of some of Prensky’s convictions.

There was a particular paragraph in the second article that caught my attention and inspired my project. In the section entitled “What Have We Lost?" Prensky writes:

One key area that appears to have been affected is reflection. Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to generalize, as we create “mental models” from our experience. It is, in many ways, the process of “learning from experience.” In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people. One of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning (either built into the instruction or through a process of instructor-led debriefing) but still do it in the Digital Native language. We can and must do more in this area. (11)

While I don’t completely agree with Prensky, I have seen (in classes and the Writing Center) what a hard time many 101 and 102 students have with the reflective writing we ask them to do. So for my project, I’m building a website that is itself a reflective writing assignment (designed to replace either the 101 reflective essay assignment or the 102 inquiry analysis essay assignment, or both).

Photo credit: Marc Prensky, from www.marcprensky.com, by Jim Allen