digital natives meet digital immigrants

Today I made several discoveries one after the other. Very good for one morning! I set out to find information about digital natives and after using my favourite Copernic metasearch engine I found Apple Learning Interchange. Within that I found Ian Juke’s podcast called Learning Environments for Digital Kids in their distinguished educators’ podcasts series. During the podcast I found my third important link of the day to the committed sardine site and the Info Savy Group.
Near the end of the podcast Jukes asks his audience to say to those around them three things that they learned. Well, amongst many other things I learnt that digital natives are kids born into today’s digital world and that digital immigrants are people like me born into a pencil and paper world. I learned that we tend to process (and teach) in a linear non-visual way and that they learn in a multi-tasking hypertext way. I learnt that chalk and talk lectures might have appealled to my generation but that the more multimedia stimuli the better for them. Two things I would tell others are that Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning is useful and that teachers and parents need to be up to date on the neuorinformatics Brain Project. One thing that will change for me is that I will no longer allow myself to be dragged back into the past in my teaching methods by educational Luddites.