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Digital immigrants or digital natives? A discussion of digital competence… A spectrum, not a dichotomy!

Amy Capelle has started a very interesting discussion in Ning’s Classroom2.0

She asks, “Are they really digital natives?

The discussion there is great! Here is my response:

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“I come from the Batman era,
adding items to my utility belt while students today are the Borg from Star Trek,
assimilating technology into their lives.”

That’s a quote I use to differentiate digital immigrants from digital natives.

BUT I have realized that it is much more about comfort level & exposure than it is about age. While I am helping some frustrated students open a sign-up verification e-mail, other students have logged into the new site, added a photo, and changed the appearance of their personal page.

There are three digital divides here preventing me from effectively using technology in the classroom. (Two from my post, and the 3rd added from this Classroom2.0 discussion.) These divides are the gaps between:

1. What I know and what I need to know.

2. What the school has in the way of technology and what it needs to have.

3. What skills/abilities students enter my class with.

#1 I can change.
#2 will never change fast enough.
#3 is the shift in this conversation.

I have both immigrants and natives in my class, so the distinction is moot.

In another post I said,

“And then there is my class Science Alive! wiki… “I think that I am guilty of seeing the value of using technology in guiding learning, but not effectively guiding learning in my technology use.”

I have done a pretty good job of getting my students going… but now as momentum builds I have come to the realization that I don’t have a marking rubric to guide me, or my students, as we move towards a final product.

My class is assembling a lego model without the instructions, or even the image of the final product on the front of the box. This isn’t a problem for the creative/motivated students; they will assembly a better model in ways that I could never have ‘instructed’ them… but some students need structure, they have been fed it for years and expect it (even from yours truly – this isn’t finger pointing, it is observation).

I let technology supersede pedagogy.

Digital immigrants or digital natives is nothing more than a discussion of digital competence… it is a spectrum, not a dichotomy!

Where does this leave us?
We want all of our students to be digitally competent.
We want all of our students to be articulate thinkers.
We need to make this happen in pedagogically sound ways.
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Let us go to the very beginning of the whole debate and none other Mark Prensky himself. In his article, Adopt and Adapt: Shaping Tech for the Classroom, Prensky says:

“…technology adoption… It’s typically a four-step process:

1. Dabbling.
2. Doing old things in old ways.
3. Doing old things in new ways.
4. Doing new things in new ways.”

I think we get excited when we see ‘new things in new ways’, but often we end up (re)creating old things in new ways. The real conversation needs to be around the constraints of curriculum and standardized testing.

“This is why the foundation of education systems today should not be the rails, but it should be the side trips. It should not be the central standard curriculum, but it should be those directions that students, that learners, both teachers and students, can navigate to on their own.” (David Warlick)

New things in new ways… creating articulate thinkers… and building digital competence as a by-product.

Originally posted: September 19th, 2007

Reflection upon re-reading and re-posting:

I remember laboring over the semantics of my title for this post. I used the word ‘spectrum’ then changed it to ‘continuum’ and then back to ‘spectrum’. The reason I stuck with ‘spectrum’ is because the competence and exposure to technology that students face today are not uniform as a continuum may suggest. Students can have very narrow bands, or very wide arrays, of knowledge or expertise when it comes to their use of technology. So if I were to make the post title into a statement it would be:

Rather than a Digital Native/Digital Immigrant dichotomy,
students have a wide spectrum of digital competence
positively correlating to their digital exposure.

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I’ll save the conversations around assessment, pedagogy and standardized testing for another day.

Comments on the original post:

  1. David,You always do such a great job of bringing things together, focusing on what is truly important and not the chaff. Schools and school jurisdictions are slow moving in so many ways. They are not adept at recognizing change or at responding to that change. This, at times, has been a very useful such as when bandwagon ideas and such were not able to make big headway. However, we have come to a time when change is necessary and vital to our ability to prepare students to transition to that place we call world. Unfortunately we cannot continue to wait until everyone has reached stage 3 or 4 as outlined by Prensky because, as you point out, our students aren’t even there. With the shifting sands of technology, I don’t believe we will ever get there. Educators will need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, with change being a constant and not having all the answers. When we realize that we, too, can be borglike if we but allow ourselves the opportunity to revel in the change and not fear it, helping our students will become synonymous with helping ourselves. Keep writing, David. You have a gift for sifting and finding that nugget. Btw, I’d like to try the book club idea again. Interested?

    Kelly Christopherson on Thursday, 20 September 2007, 07:22 CEST

  2. Thanks for your kind words Kelly!“Educators will need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, with change being a constant and not having all the answers.” What a great point. We expect our students to change, grow, and be lifelong learners… should we not do the same!Yes, I would like to try the book club again, and yes we can make it work this time… but I need a couple more weeks before I can think of opening a book for pleasure. Do you have any in mind?

    David TrussDavid Truss on Thursday, 20 September 2007, 08:32 CEST

  3. The Borg! Resistance is futile – therefore we all will be assimilated into the Web2.0…I am neither immigrant nor native – I am an illegal alien and loving it!

    mrsdurff on Friday, 21 September 2007, 03:24 CEST

  4. David,You certainly have a great take and grasp on the issues education faces, especially in regards to technology in and out of the classroom. I’ve enjoyed so much, your “thoughts”.Isn’t that what it is all about? Whether it be a violin, a pen or a mouse – this interaction with ourself, the fertilizing of ourself to bring more splendour and light into the world?We are doing that here, you are doing it so well with your blog. It is your violin. I enjoyed the stories so much and you’ve inspired me and I think I’ll start a story of the day on my own site – stories for teachers.I’m gonna keep lurkin’ 🙂

    David

    Guest on Tuesday, 02 October 2007, 01:55 CEST

4 comments on “Digital immigrants or digital natives? A discussion of digital competence… A spectrum, not a dichotomy!

  1. Thanks Dave,

    Great food for thought. Here’s a video to add to the buffet: (I saw it yesterday on David Warlick’s site)

    As positive as the message of the video is about change and potential, I wonder about the technological xenophobia I see directed at some teachers by tech leaders. I have heard the natives/immigrants dichotomy (and it is a dichotomy to them)tossed about often. There is significant, rich, deep teaching and learning happening in classrooms without technology, and there is lousy teaching happening where the kids spend more time in front of screens.

    I think if we want our colleagues to see the potential in a technology, we have to frame the invitation differently than we do for our students, beyond “if you demo it, they will come”. It is a bit like the pap served up in “A Vision of K-12 Students Today
    …it continues to frame tech use/non use as a competency/incompetency proposition.

    I really liked how Dan Meyer responded to it here.

    By the way, I admire the way you are reflecting on your posts. Socrates (via Plato) would be so proud!

    Cheers, Jan

  2. Jan,

    Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I certainly agree with you that,
    “There is significant, rich, deep teaching and learning happening in classrooms without technology, and there is lousy teaching happening where the kids spend more time in front of screens.”
    And, that is an argument I’ve heard many times before. Yet, I think there is also a lot of weak, shallow teaching happening as well, regardless of tech infusion or lack there of.

    That said, what I try to present to teachers is the idea that technology can offer opportunities that a typical classroom cannot. I still see Middle School students colouring maps and doing cookie-cutter style Country Studies, when students can be digitally ‘visiting’ countries, creating and labeling personal Google Maps and connecting to students (or Teachers or Historians) in the country they are studying.

    Yes there is, “lousy teaching happening where the kids spend more time in front of screens” but there are lousy lectures happening in our digital-less classrooms too… should we just not lecture from now on? I feel like this is a ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ kind of argument and as you can see it gets me a bit riled up. 😉

    Technology infusion into the classroom has its’ own pedagogical challenges. It does NOT make a teacher’s life easier! Technology infusion changes the way we need to teach and that poses more challenges as we figure out what is effective, engaging and meaningful to students and their learning.

    Perhaps our delivery of the message needs to change, but regardless of our approach we are trying to break a very old mold… it is extremely difficult to implement disruptive change gently.

    We cannot ‘…go quietly into our classrooms’! We must embrace the Brave New World-Wide-Web.

  3. I like the word “spectrum” better than “continuum” in this case too for the following reason: When I think of “spectrum,” I think of the light spectrum, which continues farther than we can see with the naked eye. For me, a continuum has a finite starting point and ending point.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Comments are closed.