Perspectives / Speaking With an Accent

As for the older kids, a mom reports that her teenage son is “joined at the hip with his computer. It's his alarm clock, his writing utensil, his source for research, and his recreation (video games, movies, music). He takes photos with his digital camera, downloads them, digitizes them—and creates art. He has even been known to design a tattoo or two on it—fortunately, not for himself,” she notes. His career aim is to become a “convergence journalist”—someone who can integrate technology, graphics, and writing in his work.

Students today, tagged digital natives by our lead author Marc Prensky (p. 8), are different from you and me. Unlike the digital immigrants who are learning the new languages later in life and may thus never lose their accents, the native speakers become fluent almost as quickly as each new multimedia technology becomes available. Students communicate with and about new technologies easily, gleefully, and matter-of-factly. They approach life differently because of technology, learning to pay attention to multiple sources of information simultaneously and looking to technology to teach them new information, connect them to friends, and enlarge their lives.

So what do those of us hailing from the predigital world need to do to further the learning of the digital generation at school? Multiple answers prevail. Here are some ideas that are featured in this issue.

• Tune in. Marc Prensky issues an urgent plea to educators to take their cue from how students learn. Among his recommendations are to investigate the game format as a format for learning; teach students programming (the new literacy skill); teach 21st century subject matter, not simply “the legacy curriculum”; and above all, listen to students, lest “they vote with their attention” and tune out when they find the lesson less than compelling. (The tune-out phenomenon is corroborated by another mom, whose son tells her that he and his friends spend a good deal of chemistry class playing party poker online.)
• Get real. Tom March (p. 14), who has led students to create WebQuests and research portals through which they share and create knowledge about everything from the rain forest to child labor, notes that real learning trumps shallow pleasure-seeking as an antidote to boredom and stress every time. To combat the lure of instant gratification and self-absorption that technology offers, we need to connect students with meaningful learning experiences that are “real, rich, and relevant,” he writes.
• Don't assume that all kids are technology-wise in all ways. Several of our authors note that although many students are technologically savvy in superficial ways, many have not had the experience of developing a Web page or writing a blog (p. 24), of using databases and spreadsheets for math and social studies (p. 48), or of efficiently navigating hypertext on the Internet (p. 76). Our authors offer many strategies—from improving the virtual library (p. 54) to providing students with laptops (p. 34).
• Keep our bearings. Of course, students need to be computer literate, but we must teach them “to compensate for computers,” too. “The more powerful the tools,” Lowell W. Monke writes (p. 20), “the more life experiences and inner strength students must have to handle that power wisely.” What may keep students from succeeding, he warns, is not the lack of technical skills or access to computers but rather the lack of qualities like hope, stability, respect, compassion, a sense of belonging, and community support.
• Take the hype in stride. Fifteen years ago, we were being urged to wire our schools for hardware that, had we done so, would be outdated today. The bottom line, Harold Wenglinsky notes (p. 29), is that computer use does not improve achievement instantaneously and that quality of usage counts far more than quantity. Using computers to tap higher-order thinking skills produces greater benefits than using computers as drill machines.
• Learn. Just as the student who may be sitting in class listening to music on his (nearly) invisible earphones may never realize what he is missing, we adults who may be droning on about the classics, mathematics, or a historical event might also be missing out. There are some new power tools out there that the kids are wielding with authority and will need to use wisely in the future. Educators are the ones in the position to wisely integrate technology into the curriculum and show their students what it means to be professional lifetime learners—accent or not.