People raised now do not all possess the same degree of technological savvy, even within the generational category referred to as the "Digital Natives" or "Millenials" (those who have grown up in the era of widely available digital technology). They come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and from environments with varying amounts and kinds of technology available. Technological availability and use is related more to income level than to membership in a particular generation. (Bayne and Ross) (Koutropoulos) A relatively low percentage of the "Digital Native" generation uses Internet tools to produce content such as blogs or videos, to aggregate data with a bookmarking site, or to contribute to a wiki. They might do an Internet search but they tend to gravitate toward sources with which they're familiar, such as Wikipedia, and do not know how to find or evaluate information resources (Koutropoulos) (Stewart). They might be comfortable with their social media site, but they do not know how to use software to mediate their learning and the skills that they have acquired do not easily transfer to this domain. They don't multitask as well as they think they do (Frontline: Digital Nation).
What cultural harm does it do to categorize ourselves with this dichotomy? Are we harming the students who do not have access to technology by assuming they are technologically savvy and somehow "other" from us (when they are actually "other" from their peers)? Are we focusing on one small aspect of our lives and ignoring the commonalities of the human condition? Are we allowing ourselves as educators to be placed in a subordinate and impossible position by assuming this dichotomy (Bayne and Ross)?
What are the really interesting questions related to the digital changes of the last twenty years? For me, they are:
- What are the cultural differences between younger people and my generation?
They turn to YouTube for instruction. They use memes to express social judgement. They connect with each other in 140 character tweets, brief text messages, and Facebook updates. "Happy Birthday" on Facebook, or "liking" a video of your child performing that I never actually watched, is a very different kind of social interaction from actually attending the performance or remembering that it's your birthday because it (or you) are very meaningful to me. Do we have more, but shallower connections? What are they replacing in our lives? What did we gain and what did we lose? - How do you younger people relate to information?
Information was curated for my generation. We had a choice of only a few networked news stations, newspapers, and magazines for our news content. We connected with our friends through real life interaction, the telephone (point to point), and the occasional letter. We had to describe; we couldn't show. We had to know a reliable source to find the answer to a question. Teachers and librarians were quite often our reliable sources. How has this changed how people think and learn? How has it changed how they view scientific and intellectual authority? - How do they build knowledge using the tools that are available now?
Information can be available but that doesn't mean it's accessible. I can very quickly get lost in an article on the discovery of the Higgs Boson. The Internet is good for finding quick answers ("What was that actor's name?") -- but does it change the kinds of questions we ask? Should we be focusing our students on questions that Siri can't answer? - How do they view communications?
Growing up, how did we communicate with our parents and our friends? (I always carried a dime, but there wasn't always a phone.) Were we more or less safe? Did we have more or less privacy? Did we have more time to reflect on the thoughts in our own heads and to live in the moment? Were we more isolated from the people we love?
I will close with irony -- the ultimate fictional digital native Lisbeth Salandar, whose movie title sequence is set to Immigrant Song.
The questions you ask here are so interesting to me, and I think you are right on to call them anthropological or sociological in nature. I am not so sure that you are as contrary to Prensky as you suggest, however. Like Mike Wesch, who IS an anthropologist and asks questions very much like yours, I think you are noting that Prensky just isn't enough. But of course he isn't. Prensky published his Digital Natives piece in 2001. We would all agree that the digital world has drastically changed since then. So perhaps even making the suggestion that there are cultural differences between young people and adults in the digital age (over ten years ago) was the spark that allow the rest of us to ask harder questions today. Compelling at all, or no?
ReplyDeleteI think that in 2001 we knew how to do sociological science correctly. :D Prensky maybe did make us think about issues we would not have thought about. Maybe the "digital natives" were making these claims about themselves (clearly some were -- the ones he interviewed), and by giving them a voice we are able to examine their claims more carefully and scientifically now.
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