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Communicating with the natives!. Digital Native or Digital Immigrant? Presented by Karen Stapleton, AIS. Perusing and Pondering Prensky’s Premise. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp Which one are you?.
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Communicating with the natives! Digital Native or Digital Immigrant? Presented by Karen Stapleton, AIS
Perusing and Pondering Prensky’s Premise “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp Which one are you?
Prensky’s case for ‘the natives’ . . . “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” “A really big discontinuity has taken place . . . A ‘singularity’ . . . there is absolutely no going back.” “Today’s students . . . Represent the first generation to grow up with this new [digital] technology”
Prensky’s case for ‘the natives’ . . . “. . .today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures” They are “the native speakers”: the digital world is their world; they speak its language.
And the rest of us? We are the immigrants! • Technology is the ‘new world’ for us. • We have had to learn a new language but speak with an accent. • We are not ESL students but TSL students! • We keep at least one foot in the past by often speaking in an outdated language to our students.
Prensky recommends . . . • Learning to communicate in their language • Changing our methodology going faster, less step-by-step and more parallel, random access • Incorporating both “Legacy” and “Future” content • Learning “new stuff” and “learning new ways to do old stuff” • We need to be inventive. eg take a lesson from computer games!
What does this mean for the teachers? • Personal impact – we have to change; more flexibility • Adolescence is a distinct phase; they need to have distinctly different learning experiences. • Personal ‘vision’ and understanding of how it is different. • Change for the teacher as much as the adolescent learner. • Pedagogical content knowledge to inquiry/curiosity/discovery • Reconsider our methodology • Static questions to dynamism, recursivity and discursivity
Impact and implications Changing the learning environment e.g. • Physical classroom layout, set up, organisation • Use of technology and other resources/ multimodal • Differentiation and “message abundancy”; pathways for learning • Group work and teaching strategies/methodology
Impact and implications New expectations FROM students; new modes of learning “The young person who watches digital TV, downloads MP3 music onto a personal player, checks email on a personal organiser and sends symbolised messages to a mobile phone of a friend will not be satisfied with a 500-word revision guide for Physics.” Maureen Walsh, “Literacy in the age of technology”, EQA, Issue One, Autumn, 2004
Impact and implications • New modes of language – viewing/representing • New multimodal texts and communications require new literacies; a paradigm shift • New terminology suggests change and development • New language, vocabulary and spelling/abbreviation(See Walsh article, Cambridge Dictionary study pages.) • New ‘assessment’ processes to take account of the changes in students’ texts and capabilities. • N.B. Prensky acknowledges there is a loss of “reflective” practices
Interpreting visual images Current research and visual literacy • Multimodal texts and the complex relationship between verbal/visual semiotics • Multimedia/multimodal texts multiple meanings and discourses; new ways of communication • Gunther Kress reading images is different process from reading words
Interpreting visual images Gunther Kress and Theo van LeeuwenReading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design • ‘logic of words’ = time, sequence, clause structures. Words “tell” the world in a linear, sequenced way • ‘logic of image’ = arrangement, display, salient elements. Images “show” the world in a non-linear, non-sequential, simultaneous way
Implications for the IT integrator? • Who are YOUR students? • What do they need to learn? How will they learn it? How will you teach it? • What are YOUR priorities? What are THEIRS? • Are you a TSL teacher or an IT integrator? Or both? Good luck!