This website looks at the idea of an age generation gap separating today's "Digital Natives" (in the case of this article students) from others such as teachers. It discusses how to make a distinction between a Digital native and other generations. The author explains the ideas of Marc Prensky which both agree and disagree with the authors own opinions. He relates these ideas to ‘personal life experience’. There is the idea of digital natives and other generations speaking a different ‘language’ or ‘accent’.
The website includes a counterargument suggesting that students cannot always perform advance searches of looking at resources on the web even though they have been brought up with this particular form of medium. The idea of digitalization affecting generations so much is questioned and the idea of 'legacy' is suggested to be a highly important factor. The argument of learning ideas without any influence from digital technology is implied. This can link to the idea that not every aspect of society at the moment revolves around digital technology, even though this technology is continuing to develop. The article also suggests that class and culture play a great part in usage of digital technology. Surely as mentioned with the e-learning in previous weeks, sometimes you have to find preferred method of learning?
However this article was published in 2003 limiting its reliability to 2009. Because of this what seemed to be ‘new’ or an issue in 2003 is no longer new or an issue to us 6 years later suggesting that some of the comments that have been raised in this article may or may not be relevant to today.
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I think the issue of age/ development is interesting. As time passes, a higher and higher proportion of any culture has lived with a particular change since birth and those that haven't have had a lot of time to 'get to grips with it' (my mum & dad were born before TV was invented -but they can watch TV pretty much like anyone else now).
ReplyDeleteThe point with Prensky's notions is that now, many lecturers have been playing computer games longer than their students have been alive. They have been using e-mail since before the Web was invented -and this erosion of the 'big signifiers' of digital change is ongoing. Does this mean that Prensky's arguments about the need to change teaching styles are undermined -I don't think so (however, I reject them for completely other reasons -but that's for later!)