Digital Natives and Digital

Immigrants
By Marc Prensky

Presenters:
Jessica Morones

Gamaliel Vargas
 Two parts
• In the part I, Marc Prensky discusses how the differences
between our Digital Native students and their Digital
Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today’s
educational problems.

• In part 2, the author presents evidence for why he thinks

the process occurs. It comes from neurobiology, social
psychology, and from studies done on children using
games for learning.
 “Our students have
changed radically.
Decline of Today’s students
are no longer the
education people our
in the US educational system
was designed to
teach.”
Today’s students have not just changed
incrementally from those of the past, nor simply
changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or
styles, as has happened between generations
previously.
“Singularity” is the arrival and rapid
dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the
20th century.
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
Reading Playing video games

Have spent less than over 10,000 hours (not to

5,000 hours of their lives mention 20,000 hours watching TV)

Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones

and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.
 Today’s students think and process information
fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
Dr. Bruce D mentions that “Different kinds of
experiences lead to different brain structures” it is
very likely that our students’ brains have physically
changed -and are different from ours – as a result of
how they grew up.

“Their thinking patterns have changed”

What should we call these “new”
students of today?

N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen

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 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; in reading the manual for a program
rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us
to use it.
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).

• 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 …

“Did you get my email?” phone call

 But this is not just a joke…
The biggest problem facing education today is:

“Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an

outdated (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.

• Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to
parallel process and multi-task.

• 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.
Digital Immigrants don’t believe their students can learn
successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because
they (the Immigrants) can’t.

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.
 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.

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.
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.

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.
Complaining how good was living
in the “old country.”
 New 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?”

 Content
After the digital “singularity” there are now two kinds of 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.

• “Future” content 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.
 How many Digital
Immigrants are prepared
to teach it?
 Answers to this problem..
• The first involves a major translation and
change of methodology.

• The Second involves all that PLUS new

content and thinking
Debates in some subjects…
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.
In geography, 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 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.

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!”
Our children today are being socialized in a
way that is vastly different from their parents.

The numbers are alarming:

 Today’s Digital Native Students
• Over 10,000 hours talking on • Videogames: Average play time:
digital cell phones. 1.5 hours/day.

• • E-mails and Instant Messages:

Over 20,000 hours watching TV
(a high percentage fast speed
MTV).
• Over 500,000 commercials seen
—all before the kids leave
college.
• Maybe, at the very most, 5,000
hours of book reading. These are
today’s results.
Average 40 per day x 365 x 15
years = 219, 000 .
• TV hours watched per day : 3.3
hrs.
• Commercials: There are roughly
18 30-second commercials during
a TV hour.
• Reading: 1300 books through
college.
 Prensky
• Digital Natives’ brains are likely
physically different as a result of
the digital input they received
growing up .

• Learning via digital games is one

good way to reach Digital Natives
in their “native language.”
• The brain is massively plastic .

• The brain changes and organizes itself differently

based on the inputs it receives.

• The brain constantly reorganizes itself all our child

and adult lives.

• “The brain maintains its plasticity for life”.

 Other experiments with the same
conclusions:

Ferrets’ brains were physically rewired, with inputs from the

eyes switched to where the hearing nerves went and vice versa.
Their brains changed to accommodate the new inputs.

(Dr. Mriganka Sur, Nature, April 20, 2000)

• Imaging experiments have shown that when bind people learn Braille,
“visual” areas of their brains lit up. Similarly, deaf people use their
auditory cortex to read signs.
(Sandra Blakeslee, New York Times, April 24, 2000).

• Researchers found that an additional language learned later in life goes into
a different place in the brain than the language or languages learned as
children.
(Cited in Inferential Focus Briefing, September 30, 1997).

• A comparison of musicians versus nonplayers brains via magnetic

resonance imaging showed a 5 percent greater volume in the musicians’
cerebellums, ascribed to adaptations in the brain’s structure resulting from
intensive musical training and practice.

( Dr. Mark Jude Tramano of Harvard. Reported in USA Today December

10, 1998).
When the information obtained is interpreted in
the wrong way or for personal purposes.

Western philosophers and psychologists took it

for granted that the same basic processes
underlie all human thought.

Logical reasoning and a desire to understand

situations and events in linear terms of cause and
effect, were assumed to be the same for
everyone. Wrong!
Brains that undergo different
developmental experiences develop
differently, and people who undergo
different inputs from the culture that
surrounds them think differently.

“Brain reorganization takes place only

when the animal pays attention to the
sensory input and to the task.”
 Videogames
Kids have been adjusting or programming
their brains to the speed, interactivity, and
other factors in the games.
 Computers
Children raised with the computer “think
differently from the rest of us. They develop
hypertext minds.
Teenagers use different parts of their brain and
think in different ways than adults when they’re
using the computer.
• Thinking skills enhanced by repeated exposure to
computer games and other digital media.

• We now have a new generation with a very

different blend of cognitive skills than its
predecessors—the Digital Natives.
• Teachers complain about attention spams.
• “Sure they have short attention spans—for the
old ways of learning”.
• Their attention spans are not short for anything
else that actually interests them .
• Digital Natives crave interactivity an immediate
response to their each and every action.
It generally isn’t hat Digital Natives can’t pay
attention, it’s that they choose not to.

Sesame Street: children do not actually watch

television continuously, but “in bursts.” They tune
in just enough to get the gist and be sure it
makes sense
 Reflection
• Reflection is what enables us to generalize
“mental models” from our experience. It is
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
and not forgetting about doing it in their
Digital Native Language.

“Digital Game-Based Learning”.

• Many criticize today’s learning games, but if
some of these games don’t produce learning
is because they’re badly designed.

• Some educators refer to games as “sugar

coating” unknowing that such games are
helpful for Digital Natives.
 Click Health
Makes games to help kids self-manage their health
issues.
It Did clinical trials funded by the National Institutes
of Health. They found, in the case of diabetes, that
kids playing their games showed measurable gains in
self-efficacy, communication with parents and
diabetes self-care. And more importantly, urgent
doctor visits for diabetes-related problems declined
77 percent in the treatment group.
Design is important when creating a game.
• Educators know something is wrong, because
they are not reaching their Digital Native
students as well as they reached students in the
past.

• They pretend that the Digital Native/Digital

Immigrant issue does not exist, and continue to
use their suddenly-much-less-effective traditional
methods until they retire and the Digital Natives
take over.
 Or…
They can chose instead to accept the fact that they
have become Immigrants into a new Digital world,
and to look to their own creativity, their Digital Native
students, their sympathetic administrators and other
sources to help them communicate their still-valuable
knowledge and wisdom in that world’s new language.