So I attended the Marc Prensky seminar on gaming in education yesterday (well, I attended most of it – my eyes decided to reject my contact lenses midway through the morning and I had to return home to fetch my glasses and revert to my “true” bespectacled look 
), and I left asking myself a few questions:
- Am I what he refers to as a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant?
- Did I learn anything new from Mr. Prensky’s session?
Perhaps the easiest to answer is question #2, “did I learn anything?” The answer, I’m afraid, is “not much.” To be fair, Mr. Prensky explained that he designed his presentation for an audience of Digital Immigrants, so perhaps the fact that I often felt bored and disengaged during the session will help me answer question #1. The other reason I didn’t gain much from the session, I suspect, is that much of the ground he covered is information we’ve not only heard in our class, but that we’ve already taken well beyond the cursory level he used to make his points.
I have to admit here that I don’t believe I’m fully part of the Digital Native group he described, either, no matter how much more closely I identify with technology than those with whom I shared my table (not a few of them voiced not only skepticism, but outright venom at much of what was being shared). One of his markers for a Digital Native is “Multitasking.” Do I like to “multi-task?” Yes. In fact, I often feel like I’m suffocating if I’m working on solely one subject or project at a time. I think better when I’m working on multiple assignments, have my music playing, and have at least two to three IM chats going simultaneously. That said, I’ve watched my 10 year-old nephew in action, and he makes me look like an amateur, so I know that by the time I’m in the classroom, I will be truly outclassed. I hope, however, the fact that I’m on the cusp between the “immigrant” and “native” generations will help me find the right language with which to engage my students.
All that said, the morning certainly wasn’t a total waste of time. Mr. Prensky said something yesterday that really stuck a chord with me; he shared a comment from a 14 year-old panel participant: “Don’t try to keep up with the technology. You can’t, and you’ll only look stupid.” That was a huge relief! I think his point, like Richardson and even Postman to a degree, is that not only is Technology itself not the answer, it’s barely even an answer. It’s the way we use the technology – to engage students (he said this about 100 times), to bridge the gap between “legacy” education and what students need to learn now, to find a common language – that is vital. The last point he made before I had to leave was that the most important thing we can do as educators is to ask our students, directly and with no shame, how they want to be taught. What is working? What bores them? It means we have to be vulnerable to a degree and admit that we don’t know everything. I really can’t remember any of my teachers in High School taking this approach with me, not even those whom I loved dearly. I wonder how I would have felt if they had? When I think back on those times, my teachers did have a veneer of the omniscient, and guess what? I liked it! It was comforting. If they couldn’t answer a question directly, they pointed me to the answer, and even though I ventured from them to work on my own, I knew they were behind me, guiding me.
Our students won’t need us for that…they already know (or think they know, anyway) where to look for answers. It’s up to us to incorporate their ideas into what we’re trying to teach, not only to reach them, but just to stay relevant! It’s all a bit daunting, but at the same time, I feel a charge at the challenge of it all. There is one aspect to all of this I’m afraid to even consider right now, though. Will we be able to incorporate these ideas – ideas I agree with, by the way – into our lessons and still ensure that the “all- important” standardized test is satisfied? What I heard at my table from in-service professionals about this new teaching model and No Child Left Behind was pretty bleak. I suppose only time will tell. I sure hope I don’t end up feeling forced to teach testing.
