digital natives _ isabel

8/3/2019 Digital Natives _ ISABEL

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Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants


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Our students have

changed radically. Todays students are no longerthe people our educational systemwas designed to teach.

Discontinuity > while before from one generation toanother they just changed their slang, clothes, body

adornments, or styles, etc., the present generation isa completely new one because of the digitaltechnology in the last decades of the 20th century


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Are their brains physically changed ?

Students nowadays think and process informationdifferently from their predecessors.

- their thinking patterns have changed

Digital Natives

(native speakers to the digital language while theirpredecessors aren't)


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Digital Immigrants

were not born into the digital world but have,at some later point in their lives, becomefascinated by and adopted many or most

aspects of the new technology


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> Learn to adapt to their environment, but havean accent, always retain a foot in the past

- use internet as their secondary resource

- read manual for a program instead of expectingthe program itself to teach us

> It is like the process of learning a new language,and a language learned later in life goes into adifferent part of the brain.


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Digital Immigrant instructors,who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age),

are struggling to teach a population that speaksan entirely new language

Digital Natives are used to receivinginformation really fast

- like to parallel process and multi-task

- prefer their graphics before their text- prefer random access (like hypertext)- function best when networked- thrive on instant gratification and frequent

rewards


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Digital Immigrants dont believe their students canlearn successfully while watching TV or listening to

music, because they (the Immigrants) cant

> Teachers assume that learners are the same asthey have always been, and that the same

methods that worked for the teachers when theywere students will work for their students now. Butthat assumption is no longer valid.

-From the Natives point of view their Digital Immigrant instructorsmake their education not worth paying attention to compared toeverything else they experience


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Should the Digital Native students learnthe old ways, or should their Digital

Immigrant educators learn the new?

highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards

their brains may already be different


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Educating Digital Natives

Methodology:doesntmean changing the meaning of what isimportant, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean goingfaster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more randomaccess, among other things.

Content: Legacy and FutureLegacy content includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking,understanding the writings and ideas of the past, etc.Future content includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology,genomics, etc., it also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages

and other things that go with them.

The main problem is how to teach both Legacy and Futurecontent in the language of the Digital Natives.


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Monkey Wench

CAD > the software contained hundreds of newbuttons, options and approaches to master, whichthe users weren't prepared to deal with so the

company created a videogameThe player becomes an intergalactic secret agent who has tosave a space station from an attack by the evil Dr. MonkeyWrench. The only way to defeat him is to use the CAD

software, which the learner must employ to build tools, fixweapons, and defeat booby traps. There is one hour of gametime, plus 30 tasks, which can take from 15 minutes toseveral hours depending on ones experience level.


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In other subjects we have to consider, for instance,that there is no reason that a generation that can

memorize over 100 Pokmon characters with alltheir characteristics, history and evolution cant learnthe names, populations, capitals and relationships ofall the nations in the world. It just depends on how it

is presented.


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Educators presume that (despite their traditions)the Digital Immigrant way is the onlyway to teach,

and that the Digital Natives language is not ascapable as their own of encompassing any andevery idea.

If Digital Immigrant educators really want

to reach Digital Natives i.e. all theirstudents they will have to change.

digital natives _ isabel

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