by Shawn Miller and Andrea Novicki
Imagine assigning students a multimedia project, asking them to perhaps create a five minute digital video or a simple website, only to have the same students grumble, complain or even more shockingly – ask if they can ‘just write a paper instead’? What’s going on here? Aren’t all of our students, as Mark Prensky puts it – “digital natives” – don’t they all speak ‘digital’ fluently?
In a recent Duke Office Hours interview, Cathy Davidson, Cofounder of HASTAC, and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, discussed the problem with making such assumptions:
The students in my class last semester were so insulted when I had them read the Digital Natives work, and one of my students, who is by far the most technologically gifted student in the class said “I spent so much time learning all these skills and now someone says that I came out of the womb knowing them? This is insulting.” In the same class, same age group, a student said “I can’t do this technology stuff. I can’t, and so this makes me feel like I’m defective, that I’m supposed to be born with it and I’m not”. People have aptitudes, and people have learning methods.
You can watch the entire discussion on Learning in a Digital Age below (it’s well worth your time).
In Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, he casts the rest of us (read: educators) as “Digital Immigrants,” writing that “…the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.” Prensky later concludes that the problem is that “Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today’s learners are different.”
Well, how are they different? Do they know more than we did at their age about how to evaluate digital information? Do they have technical skills we can only dream of, honed at a young age? Or, could it be that all of the focus on our students as “digital natives” has created a false assumption that all of our students can also easily/intuitively work with and create digital artifacts of their own?
In his post Clarifications on “A Vision…”, Michael Wesch stresses the difference between students’ ability to consume digital content vs their ability to critically engage with it:
“But while teaching has not changed, learning has. Students are learning to read, navigate, and create within a digital information environment that we scarcely address in the classroom. The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online. They may be learning about this digital information environment despite us, but they are not reaching the levels of understanding that are necessary as this digital information environment becomes increasingly pervasive in all of our lives. All of the classic skills we learned in relation to a print-based information universe are important, and must now be augmented by a critical understanding of the workings of digital information.”
A ReadWriteWeb article (So-Called “Digital Natives” Not Media Savvy, New Study Shows), about the results of a recent study at Northwestern University, provides additional evidence that, while our students might be fully able to passively access digital content, they may be lacking fundamental skills in understanding it…right down to that initial Google search:
“During the study, one of the researchers asked a study participant,“What is this website?” The student answered, “Oh, I don’t know. The first thing that came up.”
That exchange sums up the overall results from this study: many students trusted in rankings above all else. In fact, a quarter of the students, when assigned information-seeking tasks, said they chose a website because – and only because – it was the first search result.
Research like the study mentioned above has resulted in a renewed focus on digital literacy as an important component of the critical thinking skills we want to foster in students. Even though we might commonly assume that “digital natives” know how to find content online – we most definitely should not assume that they know how to analyze that content for authenticity and validity, or that they possess some sort of ingrained gifted ‘digital skill set’ that would somehow allow them to know how to work with the same digital content to create multimedia projects.
For Duke faculty planning student digital/multimedia projects in their courses, or for students facing a multimedia project, perhaps for the first time, there are several support options available to consider.
1) Ask a Librarian
Faculty might consider scheduling a consultation with a subject librarian as they plan a multimedia assignment. Subject librarians can point both faculty and students to key digital resources that might not otherwise be found via a typical Google search or even by browsing the library website.
2) Multimedia Project Studios
Tell your students about the Multimedia Project Studios (or ‘MPS labs’). Each of these production spaces (one on East campus one on West) offers Duke faculty, staff and students access to equipment, digital production software, and trained technical staff who can help with questions about multimedia projects.
3) OIT training
For help with software (PowerPoint, Word, Video editing, website creation), there are several options. OIT offers some free, pre-scheduled technology training, as well as an Training On Demand option where faculty can request specific topics for a particular class. Students can also access online tutorials on specific software via OIT’s Online Training page.
4) The Link Service Desk
The Link service desk can help with common IT questions (email, internet/wireless access, computer issues) and will check out digital video equipment to students and faculty with a Duke ID card.
5) Contact CIT
We’re here to help too! CIT consultants can meet with faculty to discuss and help plan instructional technology projects. If you’re looking for ideas, try searching our blog or looking through a few of our project examples.
Finally – keep in mind that, while its important to not overestimate the digital skill sets of our students, we shouldn’t swing too far the other way and underestimate them (biology professor and blogger PZ Myers shares an experience with his students dealing with a troublesome blog commenter). Given the right combination of content, options and guidance, our students often produce amazing, compelling work that goes well beyond what we originally conceived.
I have to ask, did either of the authors of this blog post actually read the Prensky article they cited? Because I’ve just re-read it, and Prensky never makes the claim that today’s students are somehow magically skilled at all things digital. Instead, he argues that because of their use of digital media, they “think and process information fundamentally differently.” Here are some examples Prensky gives:
“Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.”
Moreover, Prensky himself raises the point that today’s students may think differently but they don’t necessarily think critically about the tools they use. He writes this about the “future content” that these students should learn: “While it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc. it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages and other things that go with them.”
I realize it’s become popular to use the term “digital native” to describe the idea that today’s students are skilled at all things digital, but that’s not how Prensky used the term and doing so makes it all to easy to miss Prensky’s actual point: That today’s students have different expectations for learning given their use of digital media. That’s an idea that deserves attention.
(I should add that I’m not saying everything Prensky wrote in that article is on target. “Digital native” is, perhaps, a poor choice of metaphor for this idea, and Prensky’s description of “digital immigrants” is a bit over the top. However, there’s some good stuff in there that often gets lost when people redefine “digital native” to mean “tech-savvy.”)
I’ll give Andrea a chance to respond as well – but I’d also like to reiterate some of the conversation we had via Twitter. Our main point wasn’t to bash or even contradict Prensky (which I have read…and re-read before posting this), but to open up the floor to discuss the bad assumptions that creep up with concepts such as ‘digital natives.’
What Cathy Davidson mentioned in her Office Hours session resonated with us as instructional technologists, as we continue to see a split between how students consume media (granted, many in a very ‘digital,’ parallel processing sort of manner) and the way they approach creation and development in the digital realm. That is – they have to learn these skills just as much as anyone else – they don’t simply come naturally. That they have “different expectations for learning” – granted…I agree completely. That those expectations come solely from their experiences with digital media – I’m not completely convinced. Many students aren’t as immersed in the ebb and flow of digital culture as we often assume. In several classes, you’ll find students that don’t really know what a ‘blog’ is – or have never uploaded a video – or don’t even have an email address.
Hi Derek,
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, and for your useful blog on using clickers. I am concerned that it sounds like we have conflated several ideas. We started this post while reacting to conversations with faculty who have assigned a complex multimedia project assuming that students already have the technical knowledge and tools needed, as well as the ability to find and evaluate information, and are then confronted with their assumptions. I have some hope that perhaps this post will encourage people to think through some of their assumptions and open up discussion with their students.
Your point, that the term “digital native” as originally coined has different implications – that students have different expectations, and perhaps different ways of learning, definitely deserves more exploration, and I’m glad you brought it up.