drop into my deep blue yonder... » digital natives

chatting with ‘digital natives’

words — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:46:03 +0000

Yesterday I took the opportunity to chat to four digital natives of differing ages at my home. They were Anna (school), Patrick final year university), Yvette (university student) and Carl (last year at school). Anna (17) multi-tasks regularly: listening to music, texting or mailing, doing homework etc and finds it normal and unproblematic. Carl (18) definitely prefers to do one thing at a time so that his concentration is fully on what he is doing. Patrick and Yvette both say multi-tasking is fine and normal when all of the activities are revision or routine. When they want to learn something new they need quiet (with maybe instrumental music but not singing). They may even leave home and go somewhere to concentrate because there are too many distractions at home.

There we have it: four natives of different ages covering the whole spectrum of techniques – very unscientific fact-finding but the whole appeared to me to have more to do with personality types than being ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’.

Are digital natives a myth?

words — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:21:31 +0000

Returning to the theme of digital natives and digital immigrants, I notice that Owen writing in futurelab casts doubts in four areas – citing reputable sources as he does so:

- 20-35 year olds are more into game playing than any other group
- adults phone but teenagers use SMS’ because they are cheaper
- ICT is most used by professionals
- 34-44 year-olds use the Internet most at home in the US

Further food for thought!

digital natives meet digital immigrants

words — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 12:01:46 +0000

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.