Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > October > 29 > Entry
The natives are restless
(Immigrants arrive New York in 1887)
Imagine this.
There’s an influx of immigrants into a community. The natives try to help them assimilate, seeking to teach them the skills they’ll need in society. But there’s one problem. None of the native teachers are fluent in the immigrant language.
What’s more, it just may be that the it’s knowledge of the immigrant language that’s key to thriving in the emerging global marketplace.
Sound like some far away place? This may, in fact, describe your home and your children’s classrooms.
Here’s what I mean.
On Friday, my wife and I got new cell phones after two years so I gave the old, disconnected phones to the kids to play with. About half an hour later, electronic sounds drew me away from the frustration of navigating through the features of my new phone to the room shared by my eight and six year old daughters.
I was fairly stunned by what they were up to. One was playing a video game that I never even knew was in the phone. The other had changed the ring to a song, re-arranged the welcome screen, renamed the phone and put her sisters’ names into the address book. Neither of them had ever used a cell phone before.
Folks, let me introduce you to the digital natives. They’re our kids, the ones who have always lived in a digital world. We, on the other hand, are the digital immigrants, the ones learning the language of technology second hand.
Apparently, this isn’t a new idea, but only recently I was passed this great paper from 2001 describing the daunting challenge for our education system. Here’s a taste:
“It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize.
“Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures,” says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from ours - as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed.”
Which leads to this problem:
” … the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. This is obvious to the Digital Natives - school often feels pretty much as if we’ve brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them. They often can’t understand what the Immigrants are saying. What does “dial” a number mean, anyway?
In some ways, I’m lucky. I sent my first E-mail and joined my first Internet listserv in 1988, long before many people had even heard of the Internet, thanks to a summer job at a university. I loaded my first web page on a work computer in 1995, again ahead of the curve compared to the general public.
But nothing changes the fact that I am a digital immigrant — I’ve learned enough of the language to get along but I’m far from fluent. My kids, even at very young ages, already know some aspects of this digital language better than I do.
It’s a tough problem. Teachers, like many of us in other professions, have sought out training and experience. But we’re still immigrants and “language learners,” to borrow education jargon.
Any ideas for how to overcome the divide with the natives?
(Image credit: www.latinamericanstudies.org)
Permalink | Comments (8) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Comments
By Karen
October 31, 2006 4:18 PM | Link to this
Excuse me, Oldprof, I apologize for not being clear. The assignment was completed during class time in the school computer lab for precisely the reasons you mention. My observation had to do with difference in the abilities of the students to use the same tools given the differences in their exposure to them at home.By Scott Elliott
October 31, 2006 1:11 PM | Link to this
While the advice listed by teacher/librarian may in fact be good advice, it did not come from Bill Gates. Learn about the real author and the three additional rules he wrote that were left off this list at the urban legends page here: http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.htmBy teacher / librarian k-12
October 31, 2006 12:58 PM | Link to this
Bill Gates, Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! To anyone with kids of any age, here’s some advice. He recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world. Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it! Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself. Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both. Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity. Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them. Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room. Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life. Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time. Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs. Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one. If you agree, pass it on. If you can read this - Thank a teacher! If you are reading it in English -Thank a soldierBy Oldprof
October 31, 2006 11:52 AM | Link to this
Karen, I’ve often noted that either teachers give no advance notice of homework assignments that presume instant access to unusual resources, or (perhaps more likely) the little scholars forget to report the need for the resource far enough in advance. I think we need to keep in mind that anything beyond pen, paper, protractor, compass, and calculator needs for parents to be available to take Suzie to the library or to run to whatever-Mart for a posterboard. Children’s parents often are not so flexible; they might work 2nd shift, they might have no spare cash at all, they might have other pressing responsibilities—or they might just resent the lack of planning.By Karen
October 30, 2006 4:24 PM | Link to this
I am not as concerned about teachers as I am about those students who don’t have access to the technology in their homes. I gave my students an on-line assignment today. Some were finished very quickly. Others struggled. My guess is the difference has to do with how much access the students have to the technology at home to be able to play around with it. Is this soemthing that will further widen the educational divide between the haves and have-nots?By Tammy
October 30, 2006 11:06 AM | Link to this
There is no doubt that students process information differently from when we were in school, and that many current educators (but certainly not all) are intimidated by students’ knowledge of new technology, but there are teachers, including experienced ones, who are quite familiar with the emerging technological gadgetry in the world. As a matter of fact, some of us even try to incorporate those gadgets in our classrooms. For example, the audio books that I used to have on CD or tape are now all conveniently stored on my IPOD, which is far more convenient. Also, tech-savvy teachers use webquests (internet-based lessons) to help students understand concepts. At my last school, I was priviledged to have had an overhead projection system, which allowed me to take my students on virtual fieldtrips and allowed them to do multimedia presentations. I talk to my students of the days of party-line telephones, life without microwave ovens, and of the first 13 years of my life—when I was the remote control. Are the students more savvy with technology? Absolutely. Do they process information differently? Absolutely. Unfortunately, many people do not understand that kids and school are not the same as they were twenty years ago. As a result, nostalgic feelings often overrule what is best for our students and for our future teachers: preparing them for a life that will in include more technology than we ever imagined. How do we overcome the divide? By making sure that every student in the state of Ohio has access to the best teachers—ones who are willing to learn about that new technology, the ones who are brave enough to leap into the cache of miscellaneous parts and emerge with whatever machine will best help our students.By Oldprof
October 30, 2006 9:56 AM | Link to this
Le plus ca change. My worries are not technology (sprechen der tech sehr guht, danke) but the general anti-intellectual prejudice of our culture. Our parents were a little slow to keep up with push-button phones, UHF TV, selectric typewriters, and electronic calculators—but some of us turned out OK anyway (as John Rosemond keeps insisting). BTW, sprechen der tech sehr guht, danke—but in my estimation, L337speak is not the issue in the classroom, the issue is a culture where the highest officer in the government can publicly proclaim that he doesn’t read newspapers and still hold office.By Mary
October 30, 2006 7:08 AM | Link to this
I think it is partly a time function for time stressed adults to learn the digital language. “Hands on” classes with digital equipment might help adults. I think kids have more time to play around with the phones, etc. I still have nondigital grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, and leaf raking. I still try to read newspapers and books. I still try to sleep. But I do know quite a few adults very into their cell phones and gadgets. It is just not on my priority list. Sometimes, I could use a digital savvy kid to operate my car’s nav system. I have tried reading the unenlightening instructions, but generally I am learning it by trial and error with my husband who is also an engineer. We are from the slide rule generation.