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(:nl:)Chapter 4

''Digital natives, Digital Immigrants'' The second item, just as readily available on the Internet, is the striking terminology introduced to us around about the same time, in 2001 in fact, by Marc Prensky: digital natives, digital immigrants. People have picked up the two terms and we find them readily used, but I suspect that few have actually taken the trouble to follow closely what Prensky has actually said.(http://www.marcprensky.com/)

One of the first things Prensky says, before arriving at his new terminology, is this:

-> Today's students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

'Singularity', 'discontinuity': the terms are even more starkly expressed than John Paul would do a year later, but they share the same idea; there is really something new involved here.

Prensky is an educationalist, so he is concerned about what teachers do in their classrooms, and what the reactions of today's students might be.

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.

In fact, he goes on to say, and follows this up in a subsequent article, that today's students' brains have physically altered! Then comes his wrestling with appropriate terminology:

-> What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.

Living, as I happen to do currently, in a European and non-English-speaking context, and being a linguist by professional training, I find it interesting to hear Europeans speak of 'learning the languages of the young'. They are not referring to learning Italian, or English or Spanish, but rather to media such as music, theatre – and, I hope, digital. It is because the European language terms distinguish between, (for example in French) 'langue' and 'language', i.e. the difference between a system of conventions and rules (''langue'') and a particular 'language' (French). Ferdinand Saussure, who was Swiss, not French, deeply influenced European linguistics with this distinction at the turn of the 20th Century.

When I hear Europeans today talk about 'learning the language of the young', I realise it is the Saussurian sense in which they are saying this, but I also think they do not take it to its obvious conclusion if we are to believe both Prensky and John Paul! And it is here that Prensky's insights are worth reading in detail.

Effectively, since this book is being written in 2009, anyone under 30 will be Prensky's 'digital native', and anyone over that, give or take a year or two, will be his 'digital immigrant'. If we immediately consider the question of evangelisation, or education, or formation, then the likely reality is that the evangelisers, educators, formators of today are digital immigrants working with digital natives, but not, as Prensky reminds us, in an incrementally different way (ie just a few years older, a new generation maybe with a few differences of approach) but radically different.

The readers of this book are more likely to be of the digital immigrant variety, so what might that mean? The image needs to be expanded and exploited, as Prensky himself does:

-> The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today's older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain.

Those of us who are digital immigrants, and I count myself as one obviously at 63, have had some learning to do, and will almost certainly 'have an accent'. Having been an immigrant I know how it feels! I also know, and thank God the term has dropped out of current use, that years back when I was growing up as a child in Australia, we called immigrants 'new Australians'. I still think it sounds better than 'extracommunitarian' which is a current European reference, but it throws an interesting light on the possible ideas running through kids' (young people's) heads today when they are being evangelised, educated or formed by us – 'new evangelisers', 'new educators', 'new formators' with that they're-so-different-to-us nuance to it!

Without drawing too much analogy out of the native/immigrant and language learning comparison, we could benefit from some cross-fertilisation from linguistics, I believe, and study up on some of the processes that second language learners go through. In fact, it is subject enough for a book, not a chapter, in my view. Some of the theoretical positions of second language learning theorists hold rich material for reflection in this area: the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the natural order hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the affective filter hypothesis, to name some! Then there is the research on characteristics of the good language learner: intelligence, aptitude, personality, motivation and attitudes, learning styles, age of acquisition – every one of these areas can teach something to the educator, evangeliser, formator of today. (A useful study in these areas might be Patsy M. Brown and Nina Spada, 'How Languages are Learned', Oxford University Press, 1993). In our case it is not ESL, English as a Second Language, that we are interested in but DSL, Digital as a Second Language.

Prensky's terms have given rise to others – why stop at 'natives' and 'immigrants'? It is one thing to have a digital immigrant who has the thickest of accents and is almost unintelligible (e.g. will not use technology, prints out emails, always reads manuals), but who is at least generally willing, but what if we were instead 'digital tourists'? And I have a fear that we can easily become the tourist in this scene. We travel willingly enough but always keep a certain distance, often don't see the 'real native', stay in rather luxurious settings well apart from ordinary mortals, need interpreters, learn just what we need to be functional, and so on and so forth. That's not helpful for education and it is disastrous for evangelisation. What is it John Paul says in that 36th Word Communications Day message?

-> “But it is also true that electronically mediated relationships can never take the place of the direct human contact required for genuine evangelization”.

True of electronically mediated relationships and true, too of digital tourist evangelisers!

Can we put a finger on the real difference? (:nl:)