NCTE 2008: Marc Prensky keynote

November 22, 2008

The most exciting presenter I saw in the program is Marc Prensky, who has been writing and speaking on “Digital Natives” now for a few years. Some of my colleagues think he’s old hat, and I wondered what his topic would be today. He mentioned his most recent book called Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learning about how kids interactive video games to learn more. The only place where I really hesitate when discussing Prensky is that he does own a company now that develops and sells games, so, in part, he is a sales man, but hey, if his games help kids learn then who cares?

Kylene Beers, the NCTE president, invited several of these digital natives to introduce Marc Prensky. The kids on the stage were from San Antonio Communications & Arts high school and discussed briefly who they are from graphic designer to web designer to photographer, and all finished by stating “I am a digital native”. Prensky asked them to stay on stage with him and be his “ground truth”–essentially agree or disagree with what he said based on their own experiences. Prensky gave his own background, and then introduced his most recent book on video games and how students learn.

Prensky said that all of the current Web 2.0 tools will be replaced within five years, and we as teachers should be afraid because the shifting changes of these tools are too quick for a large number of us. A recent title in The Chronicle of HIgher Education is that “Email is for Old People”. These tools become outdated, and we need to use the emerging technologies to better engage students. They are no longer engaged in the old ways anymore. The tasks of DOING, or game-playing, multi-tasking bring up all forts of new abilities that many of us, the digital immigrants, do not have. Our capabilities, mindsets, and activities need to change because technology evolves daily.

Some of the top reasons Prensky shared on why we DO NOT use technology included:

We don’t have time.
It produces poor work.
Where’s the evidence it works?
We don’t have computers.
It doesn’t help students pass the test.
Kids will cheat.

The last one was the most profound because we need to teach more about HOW to find knowledge and information rather than worrying about how they find that knowledge. Prensky said that he’s seen programs where students are giving “open phone” tests. He advocates for these”open phone” tests because it is not cheating if you redefine how to seek out and find information. . “Most of tests are open phone tests – you [teachers] just don’t know it”, one student was overheard stating.

Young people are not just using technology differently, they are reshaping their entire lives with technology. Students have online ways of communicating, sharing, buying/selling. exchangings, learning, meeting, gameing, coordinating, evaluations, collecting, creating, evolving, searching, analyzing, reporting, programing, etc…. No longer are our digital natives “little US’s” anymore. We, as teachers, use to be able to use our own younger experiences to relate to our students, but this generation is different. We can’t do that now.

Marc Prensky

By the age of 21, todays’ digital natives have spent between 5-10,000 hrs on video games, sent 250,000 emails & IMs, have spent 10,000 hours on cell phones, 20,000 hours on TV and YouTube (most on YouTube), and have viewed 500,000 commercials. BUT they’ve read less than 5,000 paper books. Each year these same digital natives have downloaded 2 billion ringtones per year and downloaded 2 billion songs per month. They’ve also sent 6 billion text messages each day. (Prensky jokingly added “most of them from our classrooms”.) He wrote an article called “Engage Me or Enrage Me”, engagement is changing. There’s a gap emerging between the way teachers think and they way students think are completely changing. The difference between the way we, the native immigrants work, and the way the digital natives are different from us include: they work at twitch speed (how fast their fingers move on cell phones or gaming joysticks, they randomly access information instead of linearily, they parallel process data, they read graphics first, and they are just truly more connected.

Marc’s 3 1/2 year old son Sky is the same age as my own daughter, Claire. He showed information on how Sky uses digital books, handheld games, music, and a Nintendo DS (I never bought my kid a Nintendo DS so I feel like I am a terrible dad right now!)

What makes a kid a digital native? Knowledge? Capabilities? NO Attitude? YES Comfort Level? YES. While digital immigrants always keep a foot in the past, like the people who print emails. Digital immigrants don’t instinctively go to the Internet FIRST. Immigrants do not share naturally, we think “Knowledge is Power”. We assume real life only happens offline, and we think the way WE learning to do things is the right (worse) way.

Our kids are metaphoric rockets; they go at hide speed, they’re volatile, they’re headed places unknown, they need good programming and good payload, they may require mid course corrections, and they have an enormous potential payoff.

Prensky said it’s time to replace these terms of digital immigrants/digital natives. We can call this person (who requires digital tools to work) homosapien digital or the digital wise person. Digital Wise Person, the future of “wisdom” and what it means to be human are enhanced by the digital when the brain and digital tools are combined. Technology enhances our physical capacities, our understanding, our wisdom.

We now need to think of technology not in terms of nouns (PowerPoint, Email, Wikipedia) but now we need to think in terms of verbs (Presenting, Communicating, Learning) because the nouns change rapidly while the verbs do not. I found this relatively profound because we cannot keep up with the nouns, but we can find ways to make the verbs happen in our classes, learning, and teaching. Although, using digital technology doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom; digital natives need to find ways to learn rather than just learn. Teachers can no longer teach; we need to guide them in their own learning. This is a more engaging way to do it. Prensky calls this “partnering” (and is writing a book on it). 21st century pedagogy is a move from Lecture/Controller to Guide/Partner relationships. Einstein said we don’t try to teach anything, but instead we create the environment where they can learn. Moreover, peer to peer teaching is really important. How do we encourage it in our classes?

Another thing Prensky mentioned when talking about where these students learn and also teach each other is in YouTube, which he says is amazingly important because it’s changed the way the world communicates because of: volume, range, direction (textual and visual feedback), and reach. Many of the problems I hear about over and over again is the filters that exists at our own schools to block sites like YouTube. There are thousands (if not millions) of teachers who are completely frustrated with the filters, so why aren’t we speaking up? Why aren’t we railing against the administrators and showing them how the are cutting on 21st century technology at the knees? What can we do? Tell me, and we can try to do it.

The role of technology is suppose to create a new paradigm of students learning on their own. Technology CANNOT support old, undifferentiated curriculum. And teachers themselves are a technology. We need to help students learn HOW to solve future problems. Before technology can help us, we need to move to a new paradigm. We need to change the way we teach. The new paradigm can set us free, change the paradigm and then use the technology to take off. To use the technology, we need to share the work. Let students do what they do well, and we evaluate the quality because we know how to. We cannot stand up in front of our students and use the cool new technologies; we need to give the technology to the students to use for themselves and help them learn how to use the technologies.

Now longer can a dichotomy exist where students learn the old, static, locked down, unchanging ways of pedagogy until the 3PM bell rings, and then they’re released to move outside of our bordered, walled classes to the borderless, UNFILTERED “classroom” where they pull out their cell phones, boot their wireless laptops in the world of free wireless and information at their fingertips.

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