The Digital Age is Complicated - Prensky v. Boyd

 

My reading last evening was on Marc Prensky's "Digital Narratives" (using a slide deck) and Danah Boyd's "It's Complicated" (in specific, chapter 7). 

The position that Prensky takes is that the younger generation (from the digital age) are what we call "digital natives". They are inherently born with knowledge about living in their digital world. They are much more tech savvy and they process things at lightning or "twitch" speed. They can process multiple things at once and will randomly jump into what they are doing virtually. They look mainly for the graphics, then the words. They are super connected. Those of us born before the "digital age" are known as digital immigrants. They are more conventional and step by step. They process things in a linear way. They read the text first, then look for the graphics. According to Prensky, digital immigrants can be spotted easily because they use nouns instead of verbs, turn to paper before technology, they tend to feel uncomfortable around new technology. and they think that real life doesn't exist online. One of Prensky's largest concerns are that digital natives are being asked to power down in school by digital immigrants, which works against them. 

Boyd's point of view stands against that of Prensky. Boyd is very much against the terms native and immigrant. She wants steer clear of those terms because of the inaccuracies they represent. She claims that this term ignores the work needed to help youth develop a broad digital competency. She feels that parents, educators and policymakers should still be collectively intervening to support learners regardless of their digital background. Boyd feels that technological literacy takes hard work regardless of age. On page 176 she states, “Many of today’s teens are indeed deeply engaged with social media and are active participants in networked publics, but this does not mean that they inherently have the knowledge or skills to make the most of their online experiences.” She feels that there are huge variations among teens of knowledge and experience of meaningful technologies. On page 177 Boyd also states “Teens may make their own media or share content online, but this does not mean that they inherently have the knowledge or perspective to critically examine what they consume.” She makes it abundantly clear in her argument that just because teens are tech savvy when using social media platforms, that does not mean that they know how to correctly use all of the tools afforded to them digitally. Actually on the contrary, in her research, students seemed confused and unsure what legitimate resources on the web looked like.

I stand more so on the side of Boyd. As an educator of emergent bilinguals, I am not fond of the comparison to natives and bilinguals. I also find a lot of truth in what Boyd is saying. When reading Prensky's work, I was not sure where I stood. I was born between the two era's and so I grew up learning the technologies as they came (late 80's baby here)! Digital immigrant suggests that those older than me struggle digitally, yet my father works in the field of computer technology and always has (he is one of the most tech savvy people I know). To suggest he is an "immigrant" of sorts just seemed odd to me. Boyd suggests that we all must work hard to learn about technology to become technologically literate, and I feel this is more accurate. So many of my students can work Tik Tok and Facebook, yet they struggle to use Google to find credible sources.