Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

I do agree with Prensky’s premise. His analogy is very fitting. After all, native culture and language feel second nature to a person and knowledge of other cultures and languages create barriers in understanding. As an ESL teacher I see this native vs. immigrant situation frequently. An African student who has offensive body odor, a Puerto Rican who has multiple absences and tardies, or a Columbian who looks down at his under-educated classmates. Then there are the teachers who yell at my ELLs as if they were deaf or make assumptions that they have unfit parents.
The division in culture and language of digital native and the digital immigrant is not very different from the cultural and language divides I see everyday. This divide exists in my home where my husband works creating web-based training tools for Staples. He talks about things that I have never heard of and when he tries to explain I feel like one of my students. Confused and frustrated, yet longing to “get it” so we can move on. I want to know and understand all of these “cool” things my husband, younger friends, and students talk about. I want to take advantage of all this technology that has simplified their lives and created opportunities to have and experience things that we did not have before. I can go immediately online to my computer and see pictures of where my student is from on Praia, Cape Verde or send a message to friend half a world away and get a response back before the end of the day. Beats the week and a half I had to wait for my best friend in seventh grade to get a letter and send one back. If we had had e-mail, would we have stayed in touch longer than a couple years?
Yet, as one who has lived in two worlds, I lement the passing of an age of tangibility. Holding an object in your hand before purchasing it, the feeling of excitement of opening a new CD, to explore the jacket as you listen to the songs, or the smell of a new book and the creak of the binding giving way in your hand are the pleasures lost on this generation of digital natives. There are experiences that cannot be duplicated – standing in the Sistine Chapel surrounded by tourists from all over the world or sitting in a darkened theatre awaiting the trills of live performance.
And what about Sarah’s letters from seventh grade? They are still in a shoe box along with many others, to be discovered and rediscovered again, but the e-mails are gone, deleted. The modern environmentalist teacher in me is eager to make use of the fast, inexpensive, and vast accessibility of technology, but the old world artist wonders, what will we lose. It is wonderful to think of the trees and space we can save in this age where a small portable device has the power to do so much more than we ever thought possible, but frightening to think that these digital natives may never be able to appreciate the peace and beauty of reading literature or walking through a museum because it is boring, slow, old fashioned.