Digital Natives - Fact or Fiction? Both.

I was completely engrossed in the "debate" here between Marc Prensky (Prensky 2012) and Paul Kirschner (Kirschner 2016) about the existence of "digital natives," whether or not they have different skills, and whether education should be catering more to their abilities and tendencies. I was curious so I looked it up, and it seems as though Prensky never directly responded to Kirschner's criticism, which is a shame, because I think he's right ... kind-of.

To me the debate all comes down to the section in Kirschner's article where he's focused on the indisputable fact that humans cannot truly "multi-task" and that studies show that there's correlation between people who are frequent media multi-taskers (MMTs) and reduced grey matter in the anterior singulate cortex. 

...there is evidence that constantly switching between tasks may be lead to a person losing the ability to focus on a single task and/or ignore distracters and that intensive multi-tasking may impair performance and learning and possibly even concentration and thinking. Further, there are preliminary signs that such behaviour may even affect brain development. 

If Kirschner is right about this, then he has to be wrong about the non-existence of "digital natives." 

There is an enormous (and growing) group of children, young adults, and adult-adults who have come of age in an era of a constant and relentless assault of content, in a world that demands and rewards lightning-fast task-switching. Young minds that have developed in an average (non-luddite) household, consuming content in exactly the way it was designed for them to consume, have had no choice but to be molded by this world. 

 

Whether we call them "digital natives" or some other term, they exist. Studies have shown that the brains of MMTs are different. And it would be irresponsible - and in fact, cruel - to not mold the way we educate them around this dynamic. 

I couldn't find a study that aims to get at the causation between grey matter and MMTs and whether it might go both ways, but given what we know about how brains develop, it feels like that's probably the case. I'm sure there are learners with naturally more grey matter in the anterior singulate cortex who are able to withstand the nonstop assault of content in our modern world, and for sure there are some learners who have the privilege of having been sheltered from it. These learners can happily learn in slower, more focused, more actually-conducive-to-learning ways. But I feel like they're not the majority anymore, and our education system can't act like they are, or everyone else will get left behind.

And here's where I realize I have only answered one of the questions I was supposed to.  

According to Prensky, I'm a digital immigrant, and I'm probably one of only a few in this class who didn't grow up with at least a family computer in the house. We didn't get our first until I was a senior in high school. And maybe at the time of Prensky coining the term, which he first did in 2001 (Prensky 2001) I would have been. But it's been 25 years since then and I'm pretty well acclimated at this point. 

There. :)

 ---

Works Cited: 

Kirschner, Paul A., and Pedro De Bruyckere. “The myths of the digital native and the Multitasker.” Teaching and Teacher Education, vol. 67, Oct. 2017, pp. 135–142, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.001. 

Prensky, Marc R. From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom: Hopeful Essays for 21st Century Learning. SAGE Publications, 2012. 

Prensky, Marc. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Marc Prensky, 2001. 

 

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