As regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed I am rather fond of metaphors. I’ve mused on what I believe to be the false dichotomy of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ before (On the false dichotomy of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’) but in what follows I want to try and extend the metaphor so that it can be applied to real-world situations and actually mean something… :D

I’m teaching the ‘American West’ to my Year 10 students at the moment and so at lunchtimes I’m showing them the excellent Stephen Spielberg-produced mini-series Into the West. I’ve no doubt that to compare different groups of people and different age groups / generations to those involved in the ’struggle for the plains’ has been done before. Nevertheless, here’s my take on it… :p

The uneasiness I felt at the rather too-neat divide between digital immigrants and digital natives was echoed in an article in the Guardian recently (Not OK Computer). Philip Beadle writes:

A journalist suggested recently that there are digital natives (who’ve grown up fluent in a world in which ICT is ubiquitous) and digital immigrants (spitting at a much-distrusted mobile phone, which fails to obey their commands). Well, there’s a further group of us trapped in some digital hinterland, giving a veneer of competence that’s enough to fool your grandad, but which any 20-year-old would be able to put their finger straight through in an instant.

From what I see in schools as a teacher of both History and ICT, there is a wide spectrum of competencies and abilities regarding the use of digital technologies. Some 16 year-olds from middle-class backgrounds are almost clueless in anything other than MSN Messenger! What I propose, then, is to classify some of what I’ve seen in my experience:

Digital Native Americans

Let’s not beat around the bush: what schools do is act on behalf of the State to pretty much force young people to learn in a particular way. And unfortunately what they learn actually falls to the left of Kathy Sierra’s excellent Venn-diagram. Young people, like Native Americans, were inhabitants of their own learning landscape long before we educators came along. If we’re asking them to change the way they interact with the world, it had better be for good reason as they are the ones who shall be inhabiting the future.

Mountain Men

Some educators – those in tune with where their students are coming from – have tried to speak to them in their own language and understand some of their culture. Like the ‘mountain men’ who blazed a trail west across America, they show other educators (well, those who will listen) how to communicate with the Digital Native Americans. They form a kind of bridge between the two groups, teaching others how to speak the language, explaining the customs, and enabling two-way understanding. Unfortunately there aren’t enough of these. :(

Pioneers

There’s many reasons why the original pioneers went west – wealth, fortune, ‘manifest destiny’, religion, to escape punishment – and likewise there are many reasons why educators have decided to follow the path of the mountain men. The problem is that many of these ‘pioneers’ don’t really speak the language of the Digital Native Americans as all they know is what the mountain men and various pieces of propaganda have told them. Although they claim to be welcoming and understanding of the natives they are actually mistrusting and suspicious of them. As a consequence, it’s not long before the Pioneers and the Digital Native Americans come into conflict. As the Pioneers have heavyweight backing (the U.S. Army) only one side is likely to win.

The U.S. Army

As those who know anything about the history of the American West are aware, the buffalo herds that roamed the Great Plains of North America were systematically wiped out by a combination of conscious destruction of livelihood and slaughter-for-profit. This was backed by the U.S. Army whose scouts (interpreters) were often drunk and/or biased against the Native Americans. So too with Digital Native Americans: the U.S. Army in the current climate is represented by administrators who say one thing but do another. Methods of communication – access to blogs, wikis and various other sites/tools useful for educational purposes – are being shut off ‘for their own safety’.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, this doesn’t look good for the Digital Native Americans. Yes, some of them will find something like their natural modes of communication and ways of learning available in ‘reservations’ (private schools, ‘alternative’ educational institutions), but mainstream schools unfortunately will become victims of trying to integrate the learning styles, preferences, and methods of communication of Generation M in a tokenistic way. Instead, we need a revolution in education. I’ve just sat through a meeting in which everybody agreed that change needs to happen but would only commit to the most limited tweaking of schemes of work. We need change. And not just tinkering, root and branch. We need a revolution!

I’ll finish with a remark attributed to Yochai Benkler:

Today we live in a networked society. Digital information technology, the economics of networked information production and the social practices of networked conversations, qualitatively change the role that individuals can play in cultural and knowledge production and dissemination. Communities are sticky in ways that mass media never was, it requires a very different approach to what we create, how we create it and how we market it.

Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe´ today to speak of “the Internet revolution.� In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

There’s still a lot of room to develop the metaphor – who are the freed black slaves coming up from the South? What about the Spanish? The Mexicans? The Pony Express workers? I’ll leave that to someone else… ;)

For more on the original Digital Natives/Digital Immigrants divide, go to MarkPrensky.com :D