And I thought I was quite critical of Marc Prensky! Jamie McKenzie has previewed his keynote for the National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) at the end of November in San Diego. Read it here.
And I thought I was quite critical of Marc Prensky! Jamie McKenzie has previewed his keynote for the National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) at the end of November in San Diego. Read it here.
Blended Learning 2007 (Part 2)
And now, belatedly, time to write up my reflections from Blended Learning all those weeks ago… knowing I’ve got a paper and a half to write today as well.
The subtitle of the conference was ‘Supporting the Net Generation Learner’, which I’ll admit did leave me a little worried that the general message I would hear would be a simple re-iteration of all the usual Digital Natives tropes and clichés. Instead, through the different talks, presentations and lunch and break-time discussions the message was quite different. The Net Generation needs our help.
In this post I’ll try and set out some of the differences between the concepts of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Net Generation’, and why they matter.
Last week I attended the Blended Learning conference at the University of Hertfordshire. Since then I’ve been missing and AFK (visiting family), and then a bit under the weather. So here is the much belated part 1 of the post conference thoughts and reflections… just an overview of the day itself.
The BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) has a large report out from a recent study of gamers of all ages, and parents of younger gamers. Obtainable here.
As per usual, its really too long for me to read through it all at the moment (this is the first post I’ve managed in a fortnight!), but I did see a couple of amusing quotes. In fact there are a ton of them, but the following is from the very small section on ‘Skills and Education’ (pages 49-51):
Younger players quite often argue, not always very convincingly, that they learn useful things from games.
“You do get a lot of knowledge from it, because, like on Moonscape, it tells you how to do things, how to fish, in real life, how to make certain things. It tells you how to make steel, and cakes and how to mine. You wouldn’t want to go mining for clay or anything, but it tells you how to make stuff.”
PD11 M 14-15 C2DE intermediate Leeds
(I think that the game the boy is referring to is Runescape – where steel is made by getting a lump of iron and two lumps of coal and putting them in a furnace together by mouse click. And level 30 smithing skill, of course.) The report goes on to say this about games and skills:
However, references to skill development, and to educational value, often seem a little desperate; in the interview situation some players want to make the case but often seem not to really believe it themselves. They play games for diversion and enjoyment and not at all with the idea of learning things or getting better at anything other than the game itself. It is worth noting however that non-gamers, notably parents, are often deterred from playing because they lack the necessary skills. …discovering that your level of skill is hopelessly inferior to that of your offspring certainly discourages many parents.
It’s not a scaremongering report, certainly the UK games press hasn’t become defensive about its contents, but does include sections on the concerns of gamers and parents. Well worth a scan at any rate.
I can’t believe I missed this debate on Prenky’s “Engage me or Enrage me” till now. Here on Dennis Fermoyle’s blog and here on Chris Lehmann’s. Both are good reads. Found these via another page of discussion here on Scott McLeod’s blog, which I think I might re-visit later…
One interesting thing, reading the comments especially, is the degree to which people interpret Prensky’s writings in different ways. This is I guess something that has come up here before – is Prensky merely describing how students have changed (and how accurate is his description?) or is he celebrating it?
Anyway, the discussions include a number interesting anecdotal examples and stories, so worth reading through.
With heavy heart, I return to my analysis of the Twitch Speed paper, and begun here and continued here. Originally I thought I’d enjoy this bit, but as I’ve got more involved in the literature, I’ve realised – with help of some of you out there – that I’d much rather just move on. I’ll make this my last post on the seminal paper, and to boot I’ll throw in some comments on “Don’t Bother Me Mom – I’m Learning”. Then I’ll return that book to my colleague. And then I’ll finally move on.
The sections I’ll look at this time are Parallel vs. Linear Processing and Random Access vs. Linear Thinking. At first it seems obvious – parallel processing has to be better than linear: being able to deal with multiple strands at once. And old fashioned liner thinking! Who could possibly want that!
I think Prensky made a clever choice of terms here, so I’m going to change the labels for a start. So question: What do you call linear processing combined with linear thinking?
Now onto the second part (for real this time) of my look at the ’98 ‘Twitch Speed’ article by Marc Prensky. This time I’m looking at the Payoff vs. Patience section (page 5).
One way in which I may misread Prensky is the degree to which he is describing the differences (as he sees them) between “natives” and “immigrants”, versus celebrating them. I usually read his stuff as mainly the latter – and I think this is his take, that the changes are almost uniformly for the better. Am I misreading Prensky? I don’t think so, but I’d be happy to hear otherwise. But onto the review…
In the previous post, I indicated that I think there are serious problems with the original ‘Twitch Speed’ article. While I certainly do think this, I’ll pause a second and give Prensky some praise: He has done a lot to popularize and raise awareness of the (potentially – my caveat) good side of games.
Now I’ve said that, I can get back to the crit…
I’m in two minds whether to go for the throat on this article, or whether to continue to slowly dissect it – piece by piece.
I’ve opted for the latter for now. ‘Payoff vs. Patience’ is next. See how many unfounded assertions and logical leaps you can find there. Its late now, so I’ll try and get this done tomorrow. Night night.
Having ascertained that the Digital Immigrant Remedial Vocabulary list is as likely to confuse todays kids as todays adults (see previous post), I turn to another of Prensky’s papers. Twitch Speed appeared way back in 1998.
By all means have a read, and make your own opinion. My first comment I’ll put below…
Just came across this…
From 2004. Martin Owen, the director of the UK’s FutureLab has a short piece on the myth of the digital native. It’s something I’m going to write more about later, so I’m glad that someone agrees with me – and even more glad that he hasn’t used up all my arguments yet!
He does however make one point that my wife also picked up on: If people assume that what Prensky states about digital natives to be true – and it turns out to be false – then they might end up delivering teaching that is less well suited to their students than they believe to be the case.
And for anyone wondering why my wife might be so interested in this topic… she’s an award winning web producer for BBC Scotland, working on schools and education projects. It’s her job too.