Like many others I’ve had a problem with the idea of digital natives and digital immigrants, first posed by Mark Prensky . However, I am increasingly of the opinion there there is a division here we need to be aware of.
Unlike Prensky, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that because someone has grown up around technology they will be able to use it well. Come into any ICT classroom and I can show you students who have digital cameras, iPods, Bebo pages, but remain completely flumouxed by anything new, and show very little willingness or ability to work through new senerios or extend their use of the technology.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said:
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
Our division, it seems to me, has nothing to do with age, or with the amount of technology you’ve grown up with. It’s about curiosity. Are you willing to play around with something? Work out how it works? Figure out how to achieve something that you want to make happen? Or someone else wants to make happen? Because if you are, then you’ll be the kind of person who’s a ‘digital native’, whether you’re 8, 18 or 80.
The challenge for us, as educators, is how do you (and indeed can you) encourage, foster and reward that curiosity among those who naturally display it, and among those who don’t?
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