Mark Prensky Articles

At first I felt I was somewhere in between digital native and immigrant. I think I may just be an immigrant that has lived in the “country” for a long time and is pretty well adjusted. I was in elementary school when we regularly went to the computer lab to practice typing and play the infamous Oregon Trail game. I remember getting AOL and chatting online for the first time when I was in 4th grade. I do pretty well with technology, but when something goes wrong I don’t have the depth of knowledge to be able to fix it.

I feel I have fallen behind in the last four years. I think the reason may be because I have been a poor college student for the last four years and haven’t been able to buy the newest laptop or cell phone. I think my digital immigrant tendencies are more dominating because my first reaction to new technologies is usually negative. It took a long time for me to start texting because I thought the whole idea was silly; “why can’t I just call them?” For some reason, I think I am always resistant to new “fads” in general and, nowadays, most are technology related.
In high school, technology in the classroom was limited. Every classroom had an overhead projector and most teachers had a computer in their room, but that was about it. In college it depended on what classroom I was in. There were old parts of the campus and the modern buildings. Some rooms were referred to as “smart rooms”. These rooms had a “doc-viewer” and were able to project documents from a thumb drive. It definitely made presentations easier, but sometimes that meant sitting through a lot of boring power point presentations.

There were a lot of things that bothered me about this article, but it also taught me some things and opened my mind to using technology in the classroom. It does make sense to use a medium to teach that students already use every day and Prensky is right when he says that we are not engaging students. The articles inspired me to think of ways I could use technology to teach Spanish. I would love to do some kind of internet “penpal” with students in a Spanish speaking country. I am sure something like that already exists on the web, but if not, there is always Skype. I also use an online dictionary (it is a website posted on my blog) that is incredibly useful. On this website you can post questions about difficult translations or phrases and professional interpreters answer your questions. However, I have to do my best to ensure that my students never use an internet site to completely translate a paper, paragraph, or even a sentence for them. That is no way to learn Spanish.

There were also things Prensky said that I strongly disagree with. I think my agitation is escalated by the fact that he is the CEO of a game-based learning company and is obviously motivated by sales for his company. His whole basis is that kids’ brains are “developed through game and Web-surfing processes on the computer” and we should therefore adjust the way in which we teach these students (Part II, p. 3). Hold on a second; is the fact that our kids are growing up on TV and video games something that we are supposed to just accept and adjust to? That makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I think a lot of neurologists and social psychologists would argue that the brain needs more than these stimulants to develop the critical thinking and social skills essential to a successful life.

Then Prensky really offended me in “Engage Me or Engrage Me”. He compares the engagement students receive from “musicians, movie makers, their TV stars, [and] their game designers” to students back in the 60’s who “never even knew what real engagement feels like” (Engage Me or Enrage Me, p. 1). I think students in the 60’s felt quite engaged when they went on a hike, climbed to the top of a mountain, fought for something they believed in, or played their favorite sport. You will never convince me that watching Paris Hilton completely demean herself as well as every other female or a ten year old boy sitting in his room playing video games by himself for 8 hours on Saturday is “real” engagement while those other things from the “past” are not.
Mark Prensky lost almost all legitimacy with me through comments like these. Nevertheless, I will not throw the baby out with the bath water; I still think that incorporating technology in the classroom is very important in reaching students today. Whether I like it or not, the fact is that students are spending “over 20,000 hours watching TV…and 5,000 hours of book reading” before they graduate from college (Part II, p. 1).