1.8C Problem 4 Summary

1.8C Problem 4
Learning in the Digital Age

Digital Native
Digital native- students who were born in an age of omnipresent digital media,
fundamentally different from previous generations of students (pre-1984)
Digital immigrant- those born before 1984
 Seen as students who require a new educational approach, radically different
from previous generations
 Teachers should use technology to teach, in line with students’ technology-
familiar lives
Prensky
 Coined “digital native”
 Digital natives are constantly growing group of all ages, who have been immersed
in tech their whole lives
 Their exposition to tech has given them unique characteristics, different from
members of previous generations
o Better at info retrieving, info seeking, evaluation
 Children surrounded by tech understood what they were doing, to use devices
efficiently, so should design education around this
 Have tech digital skills/learning preferences that trad education is unfit for
(Veen and Vraking: homo zappiens- new breed of learners that has developed
without help/instruction by others in metacognitive skills)
Consequences:
1) Teachers of digital natives are digital immigrants who impede native learning as
they lack digital knowledge/skills
2) When/if digital natives become teachers, this problem will be solved
 Net generation student teachers have limited software available to them,
which can’t be used as a tool for actively creating content/interacting with
others/ sharing resources
 Teachers use variety of tech as much as their students, perhaps even
more

Contradicting Argument to Digital Native
 Uni students born after 1984 do not have deep knowledge of tech
o Knowledge they have often limited to use of basic office skills, emailing,
texting, surfing the internet
 Study of 1st year undergrads
o Students appear to use a lot of tech for communication, learning,
connecting with friends etc.
o But: primarily use them for personal empowerment and entertainment,
not digitally literate in using tech to support learning
 Pupils younger than uni
o Digital native is in top 10 myths about tech and young people
 Older students exhibit more digital native characteristics than younger
counterparts
o 58% students over 30 showed these characteristics
 Digital natives proved less “tech savvy” than their middle school science
teachers
Conclusion: people 50 and under, no relationship between age and internet knowledge:
higher income and higher educated linked to higher web-savvy

Significance of lack of digital-natives for teachers/teaching
 Helps teachers avoid assumption that students have skills that they don’t have
o Skills/competencies related to tech need to be taught and acquired
properly before application
 Gets rid of view that if there’s a generation of proficient digital natives, there’s
also generation of digital immigrants lacking proficiency

, o Study: students and teachers use many of same tech, differences between
use should be attributed to their difference in roles, not their age
difference
o Gap between students/teachers isn’t fixed, and can be bridged
 Relationship determined by requirements teachers put on students
to use new tech
 Digital natives not always more digitally oriented than immigrants
 Should address dangers and changes when discussing digital literacy
o Teachers should teach and be taught how to deal with online info
 Shows should be cautious of claims about changing education because of a
generational difference


Multitasker
Multitasking- person is capable of simultaneously/concurrently carrying out 2+ info
processing tasks
 Presumed that the digital natives can multitask
 Often related to children and women
o many claim young are experts at multitasking and education should adapt
to this
 human brain is single core, only allowing for switching between different
tasks
Threaded cognition- carrying out several different cognitive tasks/partial tasks in quick
succession, not simultaneously
 Cognition maintains set of active goals, producing threads of goal-related
processing across the available resources
 All resources (cognitive, perceptual, motor) execute processing requests serially
(one at a time)
 Multiple threads contend for procedural resource, least recently processed thread
proceeds
 Switching between threads can occur so quickly that performance appears
simultaneous
 Can only do more than one thing at once if all activities are fully automated,
saving the one requiring processing
 Have severe limitations on carrying out certain cognitive processes
simultaneously from psychological refractory period- period of time during
which response to second stimulus is significantly slowed because first stimulus is
still being processed
 When thinking/any other conscious info processing involved in carrying out a task:
o People can’t multitask
o Can just switch “seamlessly” from one activity to another
 Task switching:
 Shifts goal and makes decision to divert attention from carried out
task to another task
 Activates rule so instructions/procedures for carrying out task
switch off, those for executing new task switched on
 Involves dividing attention between tasks
o Each task competes with others for limited cognitive resources= performing
one task interferes with other tasks
Interference exists at neuronal level
Tombu Et Al. Study- fMRI of simultaneous perceptual encoding and response selection
Results: when humans attempt to perform 2 tasks at once, execution of first task
causes postponement of second one
- Delay results from bottleneck occurring at central stage of
info processing precluding 2 response selection/decision-
making operations

Good at multitasking= via practice, individual developed ability to quickly switch
between carrying out different tasks