Rick West

Michael brings up a question I have thought about a lot recently, mainly whether Marc Prensky’s belief is true that children today are actually wired radically differently in their heads from previous generations. Michael wonders whether this may not be just the common difference in generations, or whether it is something more.

This is a very hot debate, and I know people feel strongly one way or the other. For myself, I don’t know yet what side of the fence I sit on. For me, I wonder if it is a chicken and the egg kind of situation. Are kids wired differently, therefore we should create a society to meet their new needs, or did we create a society that wired the kids differently? And since education is part of society, and a large part of it for K-12 kids, should educational systems be designed to accomodate digital native learning, or will we only exacerbate the problem by doing so? And is it really a problem? To bring it closer to home, should I continue to read to my own children novels with linear storylines and without pictures, or should I develop their nonlinear capabilities by encouraging them to engage in multimedia gaming? Which will prepare them most to enjoy life?
I’m not sure how I feel about this, and I think I feel a little bit of pull on both sides. Yes kids are receiving a lot of graphical, gaming, simulated, high-energy stimulation out of school, but does that mean school needs to be just like that? If we make school as exciting as kids’ video games, will kids ever learn to be able to reflect, write, read, think, discuss, and maintain their attention on linear, logical thoughts? I’m not saying Digital Immigrant styles of learning (text-based, linear) are the most important, but I’m also not sure that Digital Native styles of learning (graphic-based, non-linear) are more important. Just like we should develop both sides of our brain, shouldn’t we also develop fluency in Digital Native AND Digital Immigrant styles of learning, talking, and living?

My point to all this is that I think schools should be more engaging and relevant to kids’ lives than they are now. But I also think we should not be too quick to dispose of everything related to “old” styles of learning. Lecture, textbooks, and linearity are WAY overused in schools, I admit. But they can still be important styles of instruction and of learning.

But I’m still puzzling this through in my head. What do you think?

Tag: AECT 2006

This entry was posted on May 22, 2006 at 1:27 pm and is filed under BlogTracks . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.