Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky

http://www.twitchspeed.com/site/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.htm

Summary: This article is about how technology has fundamentally changed the way people act and process information and how our current education system is not readily equipped to handle this new change. The author states that our brain structures have changed to adapt with all of the information and stimuli we have coming at us and we need to change our teaching methods to adapt to that change. He then states that we are digital immigrants coming to a new world that our students are native to, and it is up to us to adapt to this new world. The author also states that immigrants shouldn't dismiss different ways of learning and processing information for the natives just because their immigrant brains can't process things the same way. The authors conclusion is add more experiential learning to classrooms and have that experiential learning reflect subjects and methods that the students are interested in. The example he used was teaching students to code so they can create their video games about a subject.

Reaction: I think this is a very good article. It reinforces the fact that teachers are there to help students. This article also shows my age because of the usage of words. The author says that the word singularity refers to the large dissemination of information that has been happening in the last few years because of new technology, whereas I have understood the word singularity to refer to an event sometime in the future when robots gain self-awareness. Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 both dealt this subject decades before their time. Both books stated that in the future there will be too much information, and issues like censorship of books won't be seen as important because for the most part interest in reading books has died off because of new technology. In Brave New World specifically, people are bombarded with so much information that it is impossible to process all of it, so the people just pay attention to things that give them pleasure, rather than information that will educate them. Overall, I think this article is very useful and just reinforces the fact that our primary goal should be to educate students first and that can only be achieved by knowing our students and the best way to teach them.