In studying this week’s materials on the affordance of Multimodal Meaning, as well as doing some research on my own on the subject, I thought it might be helpful to add a description of the term digital natives (Prensky, 2001a). When designing a curriculum with multiliteracies pedagogical approach, it is important to consider what literacies our students already have and take for granted, what literacies we as instructors have, and may take for granted.

The term “digital natives” describes students who “have spent their whole lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age” (Prensky, 2001, p. 1).

Prensky (2001a) claims that because digital natives have spent most if not all of their lives surrounded by ubiquitous technology and interaction with said technology, “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” (p. 1), those who did not grow up in the digital world, and whom he refers to as “digital immigrants” (p. 2).

Digital natives, Prensky (2001a) claims, are used to receiving information fast, and they prefer multi-tasking and participating in games (as opposed to “serious” work). They “thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards” (p. 2). Prensky argues that digital immigrants, on the other hand, do not appreciate or understand these skills that digital natives have acquired as a result of interacting with ubiquitous technologies throughout their entire lives. Digital immigrants don’t believe that their students can learn while watching TV or listening to music, nor that learning can or should be fun, because this is not how they grew up--and, crucially, Prensky claims that “Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for teachers when they were students will work for their students now” (p.3; my emphasis). Prensky then argues that this assumption is “no longer valid” (p. 3).

Although this paper is about 20 years old now, and has been the subject of much debate (See, for example, Bennett, Maton & Kervin, 2008), I believe that it is still important for educators and curriculum developers to keep current with how their students have grown up using technology. Technology evolves, sometimes very quickly, or so it seems, and older technologies and ways of interacting with technologies become outdated or obsolete. At the same time, educators need to be aware of their own biases and assumptions as to what their students are able to do with technology. As Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008) remark in a review of the literature, while there is evidence that “a proportion of young people are highly adept with technology and rely on it for a range of information gathering and communication activities” (p. 778), there also was, at the time of their writing (and I suspect still today), “a significant proportion of young people who do not have the levels of access or technology skills predicted by proponents of the digital native idea” (pp. 778-9).

And I think this is a problem that we still need to confront today. We assume that our students are adept at using technology, and that they have grown up with ubiquitous access to it, but that is not always the case. As an older digital native who started teaching college in 2008, I have found myself doing more tech support than I expected with college students who are younger than I am--because my assumption has been that they should be better at technology than I am. Sometimes their challenges are due to a lack of adeptness or access to technology, whereas on other occasions, it’s been due to the digital divide between what interacting with technology was like when I was growing up, and through my college career, and what it has been like during their lifetimes. For example, anecdotally, many students seem to lack the skills of “troubleshooting” that I acquired by messing around with computers in and out of school in the 1990s and early 2000s. I’ve had students email me to tell me that a website they were asked to explore doesn’t work, because they were given a URL that wasn’t hyperlinked; to me, the natural next step, although admittedly an inconvenience, is to try copying the URL and pasting it into a web browser. That doesn’t occur to students who are used to the convenience and ubiquity of hyperlinks.

Cope, & Kalantzis, M. (2000) state that today, “[m]eaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal” (p. 5), and that “[w]hen technologies of meaning are changing so rapidly, there cannot be one set of standards or skills that constitutes the ends of literacy learning, however taught” (p. 6).

Based on the arguments presented above, I believe that literacy needs to be a two-way street, where educators (whether they are “digital immigrants” or “older digital natives”) learn how to effectively manipulate the affordances of new multimodal technologies (a never-ending process, as technology evolves and new affordances emerge), and students (“newer” digital natives) learn how to effectively work when newer affordances that they take for granted “break down”.

References:

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British journal of educational technology, 39(5), 775-786.

Cope, & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies literacy learning and the design of social futures / edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis for the New London Group. Macmillan.

Prensky, M. (2001a, September/October). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

Prensky, M. (2001b, November/December). Digital natives, digital immigrants, part 2: Do they really think differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 1-6.