On my way through to Edinburgh this morning I decided to listen to the latest edition of the BBC's Digital Planet podcast. This is a really good show that never fails to throw up something of interest and relevance to me in my professional and personal dealing with technology.
The first article featured a new research paper from DEMOS called Their Space: Education for the Digital Generation. It proved to be quite an enlightening listen because they actually had a digital native on the programme! This 15 year old girl talked about how she and her friends used ICT in an invisible way in their lives. The only time it became overtly visible she claims was when teachers, (due to government regulations no doubt she mutters under her breath) told pupils that 'this is a mouse' or 'save your file to the appropriate folder'!!! The contempt was tangible I tell you.
It just so happened that I was on my way to speak to PGDE(P) teaching students about Games and Learning and as part of that talk I intended to introduce Prensky's idea of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. This podacts was excellent as it gave me the perfect way in which I could illustrate this from the native's perspective.
Now to read that paper from DEMOS...
I agree, Digital Planet is constantly on my ipod subscription list.
Posted by: Gordon McKinlay | January 24, 2007 at 08:24 PM
After lots of discussions this week I've been wondering whether the natives/immigrants thing really stands up:
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/03/technophiles_ne.html
Is it a simple or simplistic way to look at things now? I think it might have had more value two or three years ago but since this explosion in information has actually happened I'm seeing more 'natives' above Prensky's 25 years old cut-off than below it ;-)
Posted by: Ewan McIntosh | March 11, 2007 at 10:43 AM