Prensky and Boyd

 Initial thoughts after reading and listening to the Prensky (2001) slide deck: The slide to which I had the strongest reaction was the slide about the high school student commenting that when he went to school he had to "power down." I've been hearing similar comments from a number of students this year in my 4th grade classes. While my school is considered "lower tech" than most and a number of families like it that way, I do wonder who we are losing when we insist that devices need to be turned off or highly regulated. Are we missing the boat? And maybe more importantly, perhaps we're not even speaking each other's language, to use Prensky's metaphor. Quite a few of my end of year surveys featured comments from students mentioning that they wanted more time for tech, more time for gaming, etc. (Though, to be fair, many also asked for more field trips and more outdoor time). 

versus 

My 4th graders (pictured on a hike, above) love both...

I think of myself as somewhere between Digital Native and Digital Immigrant, with a stronger "Immigrant" leaning, but I'm learning and I can feel myself changing. The most noticeable shift has been in my response to graphics over text. I just feel more and more like the graphics have to grab me or I'm not interested. I know that graphics are absolutely critical in reaching my students and I've been using them more and more frequently in my classroom, but digitally and physically. And yet, I still wanted the paper copy of the primary text for this course...

Then I read Boyd's (2014) criticism of the term "digital native" and found myself nodding and writing the words "yes" and "this" over and over in my notes. Boyd writes that the narrative of Digital Natives versus Digital Immigrants "distracts" from the real work, which is “understanding the challenges that youth face in a networked world," and she notes that even Prensky acknowledges that what all humans need is increased "digital wisdom." Boyd's assertions that there is a significant "digital divide" between rich and poor resonated with me, as did her long discussion of the ways that teachers have attempted to censor what young people access on the internet, focusing primarily on Wikipedia. I could go on and on with the connections I've made, but I will keep it to a few examples to keep this post somewhat concise!

Boyd's exploration of how teachers and students interact with Wikipedia and Google directly correlated with my teaching experiences. Just a few weeks ago, I worked closely with a fourth grade student and encouraged him to use Wikipedia to begin his research about the company Tesla for a project he was creating. He was resistant until I showed him how to access the citation list at the bottom of the page and how to look up the history of the site. I have had a similar experience play out over the years with older students - they simply don't realize that Wikipedia is edited, crowdsourced, vetted, etc - and they don't know how to use a list of sources to verify the information they're reading. I think Wikipedia actually makes this obvious! I chuckled when I read about the student who faked his sources because he knew his teachers wouldn't check. In my notes I wrote, "Yup!" - as a high school English teacher with a student load of 80 - 100 students, there is no way I'd have time to check sources! I thus agree with Boyd's assertion that censorship does not help students and that instead "they need to know how to grapple with the plethora of information that is easily accessible and rarely vetted.”

The digital divide is a problem that was most illuminated for me in my work at Johns Hopkins University. As an instructor and coach for the capstone project of the Master's in Education degree for TFA and TNTP teachers, I could see clearly who had regular access to computers and who did not. Some of my students were relying on their smartphones to access Blackboard and even attempt to edit a Google slides deck on their phones. Though the program admissions "required" students to have access to a laptop or desktop computer, many of my grad students (all of whom were also working teachers) used the computers provided by their schools, and often lost access to those devices in the evenings or weekends when the schools were closed. Boyd's anecdote about the girl who texted her friends to ask them to do the research for her actually played out on a regular basis with my students. In short, those teachers who came from a place of more privilege - with their own computers, high speed internet in their homes, and the like - were actually more successful in the MsED program, further reinforcing the race and class gap the school of education, which like schools of education everywhere, was predominately comprised of white, well-off women.

So, yes, I think that Boyd's argument is still relevant and incredibly important. She writes that "becoming literate in a networked world is hard work, regardless of age," and I believe that it is my responsibility as an educator of both students and teachers to help learners become more digitally wise.