Some good quotes from Clifford Nass:

“It seemed as though they could actually do two things at once. What do these kids know that I don’t? It drove me crazy. That’s what inspired my research.”

But he found that “they’re not amazing. They can’t really do it.” His research shows that the students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.

… “We’ve reached a period where attention is no longer valued. There’s been a cultural change where we’ve forgotten about the idea of paying attention,” he says. “And people have started to resent that.”

I haven’t banned laptops from my own lectures – indeed, only small numbers of students bring laptops to lectures at UWS, so it hasn’t really been a major issue. In some classes I’ve given out laptops – but that has been to allow students to do practical work at set points in a class (its hard to teach programming in a lecture). I have this year used mobile phone based response/poll systems in class and that did work well – using the technology to concentrate attention on the task, without allowing it to become a distraction seems to be key.

Sherry Turkle makes a very worthwhile point:

But what professors are learning to say is: ‘You know what? In this class we’re here to be with each other. We’re here to be a community. Let’s make the most of it.’

There are of course two sides to this – lecturers need to do their part to engage students and to try to promote learning – and students need to learn how best to help themselves and understand the negative impacts of partial attention.

(See some of the other posts here on multi-tasking for links to other studies)

The major part of the article is a very biting critique of Prensky’s notions on Digital Natives and Immigrants, and his somewhat idiosyncratic and spotty use of academic research:

Prensky quotes Dr. Perry out of context and without citing which article or study he has in mind. He makes it seem like Perry is supporting his claim that growing up digitally will change the brains of the young.

…

If anything, Perry is arguing against the digital world that Prensky welcomes and celebrates.

His view of current teaching practices and teachers:

Where does Prensky come up with this kind of nonsense? Progressive educators have been arguing for learning that is engaging even before the advent of the television. John Dewey, Hilda Taba and many others have argued for learning that appeals to the senses and sparks the curiosity of the young.

The following sections are less well argued however. Jamie turns the phrase ‘digital deprivation’ round to refer to people who are so immersed in a digital world that they live in an impoverished physical world. I think there can be some truth to this (I can think of individual students past for whom this was certainly true), but not as well argued, backed up or qualified as it should be.

Thanks to Gia for pointing me to this article.

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.

First, I know that my understanding of the terms is not a universally accepted definitive one – and that they are at times used interchangeably. However, both terms have a range of connotations, and these can make them quite distinct. Making this comparison is also an opportunity for me to revisit many of my previous posts as I try and weave them together.

Connotations of Digital Native

The phrase ‘digital native’ implies fluency, that digital natives are all capable, able and fluent users of technology. Some of the literature on digital natives will go further and claim that they are all fluent at ‘programming’ – blurring the very significant gap between programming an iPod to play your favourite tracks and programming a computer in C++.

We know this is not true. For example, are they really tech savy? They might still be from the wrong side of the digital divide, they really might. And if they are from the right side of the divide, they still might not be capable of making sensible judgments about what they read on web.

The dangerous part of making assumptions about digital natives, is that is ascribes a level of fluency and understanding that is likely not there. And if this mis-information is used to inform education policy and practice then we risk not providing the support that kids really need.

The other (yes there is more!) negative connotation of digital native is the ‘digital immigrant’. Some authors go so far as to explicitly claim that being a digital immigrant means that you will never be a fluent user of technology. To me this seems counter-productive in the extreme – what is to be gained from telling teachers and parents that they will never, ever, be fluent users of technology? Digital super-powers which don’t exist have been ascribed to the youth, and then comes this message to deter older people, who are capable of learning to use technology, from even trying.

Connotations of Net Generation

In contrast, ‘Net Generation’ says that the differences are a generation-gap thing. And generation gaps are something that we are getting used to. Younger generations may like different music or dress different and will be more caught up in a range of trends and fashions, but generally speaking its another generation of youth. Instead of being defined by the musical or political environment around, this generation is being defined by the pervasive technology that surrounds (most) of them.

The environment now includes a huge range of social networking tools. These are easy to use, and let people keep in touch and communicate over the internet. They do not require superpowers to use – in fact the most common use of Web 2.0 is just another avenue for people to do what they would do anyway… chat to friends. OK, they can post pictures and video clips, but the underlying behaviour is the same, just the tools are different. Don’t agree? How about this hypothetical rumination on the ‘Telephone Native’:

“It’s amazing, they just pick up the phone and tap in numbers completely naturally and before you know it, they are talking to one another! I mean in my day, I had to sit down and write a letter and then post it – or actually leave my house. This new technology is amazing. Who knows where it will lead.”

Amazing indeed.

Or, how about this from a piece last month on cyber-bullying on the BBC.

“Bullying has entered the digital age. The impulses behind it are the same, but the effect is magnified. In the past, the materials of bullying would have been whispered, shouted or passed around.

“Now, with a few clicks, a photo, video or a conversation can be shared with hundreds via e-mail or millions through a website, online profile or blog posting,” concluded report author Amanda Lenhart.

Or comments from one of the presentations at BL2007 on students’ information seeking behaviour:

Just as when we had a question about a coursework, our first approach would be to ask another student – and only if that failed would we look to a tutor or the course yearbook, todays learners do the same. You can have an online discussion forum, but chances are that students will often IM other students first, and may only use forums as a last resort…

(paraphrased from, I think, Georgia Georgiou’s presentation “Take a break: How can the net generation learners become reflective lifelong learners”). I can attest anecdotally to the truth of this… this year the students in a particular group of friends each submitted a coursework where they got stumped on the same particular problem and didn’t realise that the solution was in the lecture notes (available online) and had also been asked and answered in the class discussion forum. They had clearly pooled resources and tried to work together… but their approach (get help from friends, ignore the official sources) was as poor as that of similar students in my generation.

Beyond the connotations

This post has already got a bit out of hand so I’ll try and be brief. Past the connotations attached to terms, descriptions of Digital Natives and the Net Generation tend to have a lot in common, but the differences are often there – if a little subtle.

Both views accept that students today multi-task more. Writings on Digital Natives celebrate this. Discussing the learning support needs of the Net Generation, the lack of concentration and the surface approach to learning engendered by this lack of focus are issues raised.

Digital Natives are considered masters of the technological domain. The Net Generation are surrounded by ubiquitous communication technologies, but we can question the degree to which they have mastery over it, or an unnecessary dependence on it.

When discussing learning support for Digital Natives, authors appear to consider how youth are different and how we should adapt our teaching and ways of life to suit them. The dominant theme at the BL2007 conference certainly agreed that todays youth are different. Some of these differences show as reduced attention spans and a greater tendency towards surface and strategic approaches to learning (the strange idea of ‘just-in-time-learning’, where information is gained just in time, written down or applied then quite likely forgotten just as fast – a bit like learning, only without the learning).

Yes, we have to engage learners who are more accustomed to the visual than the textual, but we also need to try and help them learn better how to engage in deeper learning.

Digital Natives and the Net Generation both exist in a rarely-ceasing flow of information – television, video games, mobile phones, texting, IM’s, social networking. But are they informing themselves to death?

The end?

Despite the length of this post, this is my first real attempt at drawing a number of threads from this blog together. Comments appreciated.

You can also find many more links to discussion about Digital Natives and Immigrants here: http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nativesImmigrants

It was a long day for me… left the house at 5.15am to catch an early flight (and the flight back was delayed almost an hour due to an admin error!). Got to the conference in time for coffee and pain au chocolat.

A very busy schedule of talks – 6 streams for most of the sessions. This was a bit of a shame, and a number of times in the schedule one study on the use of blogs (or whatever) would be up against another.

Second Life made brief appearances in the introduction by the director of Hertfordshire’s Blended Learning Unit and again in Grainne Conole’s keynote. In sharp contrast to a year or so ago when I had difficulty discussing Second Life at all at an educational event, now it appears to be a must-do at an event like this to mention a Second Life project.

Nice touch in the introduction though when the audience were asked if they had tried Second Life. A fair sized scattering of hands throughout the audience. Then they were asked if they liked it. At least 3/4 of the hands went down. Given the difficulties with orientation in Second Life, I don’t think I’m surprised with those results, but it didn’t stop a good audience turning up for my talk later in the day. More on that later.

The conference made pretty good use of technology itself. Elluminate was used to make all talks available on the internet. In each session there was a PC under the speakers’ control, and another logged into Elluminate controlled by an online moderator. The moderator was there to set the video feed of the speaker and also clicked through a copy of the presentation for online attendees. It wasn’t possible to tell how many people were logging in to see the talks, and online attendees were only given an opportunity to ask questions in one of the sessions I attended, but it all seemed to go very smoothly.

Overall the Blended Learning Unit at Hertfordshire did an excellent job of organising the conference. I think they did let themselves down just a little though by dedicating a bit too much time and space to their own work at what is a national conference… sure I spotted one of their members with at least three posters on display. Hosts privilege I guess.

The theme of the conference was ‘Supporting The Net Generation Learner’, and the idea of the Net Generation Learner is clearly related to the idea of the ‘Digital Native’… but I think without the same set of connotations. I’ll try and expand on this in a following post, along with some more detailed reflections from the day.

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.

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.

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?

Reasoning.

Collecting thoughts to build a structured argument, focussed thinking on a topic. Critical thinking. Even Prensky admits that this may be a problem to some extent:

A difficult challenge is how to create experiences that allow people to link anywhere and experience things in any order yet still communicate sequential ideas and logical thinking.

Actually, I’d say the challenge is how to help them learn and develop their critical thinking skills. Elsewhere (part two of ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’) Prensky has made a big issue out of how adaptable the human brain is. So there is every hope that we can find ways to help today’s twitchy youth become less reliant on constant stimulation and novelty.

Actually, its a lot less simple than this. Many great thinkers have been distinguished by their ability to pull on different strands of thought, and bring together different ideas in valuable ways. But establishing an argument still requires a certain degree of linearity: understanding that consequences follow on from other factors.

As well as disagreeing with this overview, I also disagree with many of the details in these two sections. So time to give them the paragraph by painful paragraph treatment. Starting with Parallel Processing vs. Linear Processing.

First, are the over 30′s uncomfortable with multi-tasking? I recall from my youth that my mother would do household chores while watching television and holding conversations. Not too different from some of the multi-tasking examples of todays youth that Prensky gives. My mother also told me about an aunt of hers who was able to hold three different conversations on different topics and in three languages at the one time. How’s that for multi-tasking! And I suspect that any study of “young computer artists” would discover that the amount of attention they pay to their music, and involvement in chatter, drops when they are fully involved in a task. (Dare I mention flow here – see the previous post for the discussion on that!)

Paragraph 2. Does a viewer of a modern news programme, where the screen is covered in different pieces of information receive more news in the same amount of time? Certainly. Do they get the same depth of information? Certainly not. Facts without hope of much real understanding. Facts presented in such a way as to explicitly discourage understanding – almost saying that it doesn’t matter if you know the causes or consequences of any of these events, its the number of events you know about that counts. Again, time to invoke Neil Postman’s excellent and his ironically entertaining “Amusing ourselves to death”.

Paragraph 3. It has been said in discussions in this blog that Prensky sometimes adapts his message to his audience. This paper was published for business leaders. And so, in this paragraph we read that “managers should be thinking of additional ways to enhance parallel processing and take advantage of this increased human capability“. It is clear that the dream of increased productivity is being sold here to the audience that clearly wants to buy. Personally, I don’t see this as any “worker’s Nirvana“, Nintendo generation or otherwise.

You may be happy to know I don’t have much to say on para 4 – the history of business organization is not a strong point of mine. Next.

At last we reach the section on Random Access vs. Linear Thinking. And it only has two paragraphs!

Para 1. Prensky claims that the hypertext information structure of web has increased the awareness and ability of youngsters to make connections. This is a very dubious, and unsupported statement. There is a difference between being able to follow hypertext connections and being able to mentally form meaningful connections between seemingly dis-connected facts. Is being “freed from the constraint of a single path of thought … generally an extremely positive development“? Not when individuals have to struggle when it is useful or necessary to do so! As noted above, even Prensky recognises that there are some problems with this.

Para 2. After some blah about corporate intranets, Prensky brings in big guns, the military. If the military do it, its got to be right, right? Anyway, we are told a little about an information sharing system developed by the US military which makes information gathered available electronically near-instantly – and which allows access, browsing and investigation of the data. Prensky describes it as “the freedom to create and explore random paths that lead to new ideas“. Personally, I’d hope that more time was spent following interesting or meaningful paths rather than random ones, and I can’t shake the feeling that what may be a very useful and capable data-sharing network is being sold here as something much more than it is.

I can’t really argue with the vague statements calling for more use of modern electronic alternatives to traditional business reports and communications media. In many cases tools like wikis really can help teams share, access and update information far easier than to-ing and fro-ing with long written reports and design documents. So, to some extent, I don’t disagree with all of the solutions or systems that Prensky would have business leaders adopt – but I strongly disagree with his analysis of why.

I stated above that linear thinking and processing could perhaps be renamed reasoning. What about parallel processing and random access? Does this lead to disjointed, mixed-up thinking? I think we have to recognise that thinking about too many things at once and replacing focussed attention with a channel-surfing approach to data collection might lead to severe problems with analysis. As Neil Postman argued it is the role of the education systems to adapt to the media society, not to unthinkingly adopt wholesale the media culture – but to recognise how it may impact on students’ styles and ways of thinking, and to try to cure problems that result.

Want an example of parallel processing, random access writing? I’d refer you to the section in the paper on Fantasy vs. Reality. As I argued before this is a good example of disjointed facts being used to support a conclusion despite very limited connection actually existing between the supposed causes and consequences.

In the 21st century the skills of recognising what information is relevant, and understanding why and how will continue to valuable life and work-place skills. Having access to more and more information may be making this more important than before. The internet-age brings a vast increase in access to data, facts and factoids. Critically evaluating and analysing this will require some good old fashioned reasoning.

phew. Made it. And now I realise that I also promised to deal with “Don’t bother me mom…” in the same post. So very quickly, in bullets! Note: I have not read the book in full. I have browsed it only, and read a few chapters. I do not plan to read the book in full, it would upset me too much.

• The title. It’s very patronising. I hate it, but not half as much as my wife does. It’s actually a real life quote (given somewhere in the book) paraphrased to make it real annoying and provocative.
• The book itself is written in a fairly patronising tone. I know that my wife and I aren’t really the target audience, but it really does come across like that to us.
• He appears to write off the value of almost every form of learning that isnt a computer or video game, and is generally wrong to do so.
• He exaggerates the learning value of non-educational games, and fails to critically address any areas of concern.
• He claims that books are not particularly important any more! “…almost everything that has ever been written – with the exception of science fiction and predictions – is about the past. While still important to know about, the past no longer informs the future as it used to.” (p160-161).
  I don’t even want to begin with this one. Funny that this is one of the topics that Neil Postman writes extensively about.

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…

The question of whether the change is ‘better’ or just ‘different’ certainly applies here. Indeed, in describing the increasing need for immediate feedback and constant stimulation, Prensky could almost be making the same case as Neil Postman does in ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’. Except with the opposite opinion on whether this is a good thing or not.

Certainly, with need for immediate feedback, does this mean Prensky thinks that todays Digital Natives lack foresight, insight and the ability to make long-term plans? What kind of immediate feedback do these people deserve and/or need in the workplace? Some kind of constant ego-stroking and supplies of cookies every time they do a good thing?

“Why, they ask, should I finish school when elementary school kids can design professional Web sites, 20-year-olds can start billion-dollar companies, and Bill Gates, who left school for something with more payoff, is the world’s richest man?”

The elementary school kid bit is clearly an exaggeration for effect. Yes, school kids can make web pages – there are enough tools out there that make it easy – but how many school kids can make professional quality web sites? And as for entrepreneurs like Gates – yes it is true that many of them (Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar… ) left either school or university before completing, but these are the success stories, and these are driven people. Entrepreneurs don’t get constant payoffs – they generally have to invest significant amounts of their time before they get any payoff at all. If the Digital Natives don’t realise this, then they could get a shock.

I think such entrepreneurs do make useful role-models but so do Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who were PhD students when they developed Google. Ok, they didn’t finish their PhD’s – but neither did they originally intend to go into business.

“…it was at first strange to me that the same people who prefer ‘twitch’ games often have great patience with the… long waiting times in a game like Myst.”

Excuse me? For the most part Myst was played by people who don’t prefer ‘twitch’ games. Again, this paragraph ends with words to the effect that Digital Natives need rewards now – rather than payoffs “in the long run”. Again – see entrepreneurs.

“One clear business manifestation of this… is the increasing demand for a clearer link between what employees do and the rewards they get, leading to the growing trend toward pay-for-performance.”

Hmm. Try this web search. Or take out the ’2006′ for a broader perspective.
To the extent that this paragraph is true about the trends for spin-offs and for equity as compensation, I would suggest it is only true for a tiny percentage of companies and for very specific sectors of industry. And more so in some countries and regions that others. I certainly don’t see any of this as representative of the general state of affairs in the UK.

All in all, I think I’ve found enough things to disagree with in these three paragraphs. I don’t think the logic is as twisted or bizarre as in the “Fantasy vs. Reality” section that follows. But still, plenty to argue about.

I’m only going to make one more entry about this paper, because I’ve had about as much as I can take.

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.

By all means have a read, and make your own opinion. My first comment I’ll put below…

I want to start with a bit about the section titled “Fantasty vs. Reality” (page 6). Does this make any sense at all? I could be wrong but weren’t fantasy and science-fiction really big in the 60′s? And all this stuff about the under 30′s being more surrounded by science-fiction and fantasy than older people just doesn’t seem particularly relevant to anything – let alone particularly true.

For a start, at the time Prensky wrote this I was under 30, and so part of the group he is discussing here – and though I was heavily into fantasy and science-fiction during my youth I was very aware that this was not usual or typical. Being into football or Top of the Pops – usual. Tolkein? Dungeons and Dragons? A lot less usual.

So the start point of this section seems false. The explanation – that young people like fantasy and science-fiction because of computers seems even odder. I thought it was mainly due to books and films – Lord of The Rings, Bladerunner, Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on. Extending forward to todays children, they get a lot of fantasy and science-fiction now through Harry Potter, Buffy, Games Workshop, Lord of the Rings… more films, TV, books and table-top gaming.

Then all this is followed by a non sequitur leap into how young companies – or companies with young employees – may feature more informal furniture and settings with play areas. He says that this follows on from the original observation, but I really can’t see the link at all. Sense Make Not Does.

So what we have is a short section of paper in which a dubious assertion is followed by an equally dubious explanation then a disconnected leap to a conclusion that has nothing to do with either.

But this is the fluff part of the paper – and not, I think, very important. Tomorrow – or soon after – I’ll return with part 2, where I’ll try and argue that the paper has more significant problems than this.