Marc Prensky

From White to Walls

The concept of “Visitors” and “Residents”, posited by David White while at the University of Oxford, seems to me a better way of looking at how we engage with the web. An introduction by White to the Visitor and Residents paradigm is available in video form:

The abstraction is detailed in a First Monday* paper and opens with a critique of Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.
In addition to using “tool” and “place/space” metaphors to represent engagement with online technology, White explains the Visitors and Residents typology as a continuum rather than a binary choice. Instead of placing each of us at a particular point on that continuum White suggests that our interaction with the web might mean alternately assuming the role of Resident and Visitor depending on context e.g. private vs public life.

Before I move on briefly to Sugata Mitra and his “Hole in the Wall” and “School in the Cloud” projects I might add a closing thought or two on Marc Prensky.

In the introduction to his book of essays, From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom, Prensky states that “students are stuck … with a curriculum that is highly outdated.” I cannot entirely agree with this blanket dismissal of the past. Ask my brother, a lecturer in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish at UCC, if he wishes Latin were still part of the secondary syllabus. The answer would assuredly be in the affirmative.
Prensky goes on to list the essays in his book – I despair of some of the titles – including one called “The True 21st Century Literacy is Programming”. I must demur. As a former programmer I see development environments advancing to the point at which anyone with a modicum of understanding can input the most general of parameters and output perfectly functional (if not necessarily efficient) code. The true 21st Century literacy will be literacy itself. Not just the narrow ability to read and write but, as Aristotle said, “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I fear, to quote G.M. Trevalyan, that education “has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”

From his 2007 TED Talk, Kids can teach themselves, through his 2010 Talk, The child-driven education, and culminating in his 2013 Build a School in the Cloud, where he discusses Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs), Sugata Mitra’s themes are easily understood.

However I find the notion of a teacher as being surplus to requirements somewhat contradicted by the level of their involvement in classrooms such as this where Mitra’s methods have been adopted.

*First Monday is an open-access peer-reviewed journal for articles about the Internet, hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A small aquatic bird of the family anatidae

The PBS interview with Marc Prensky regarding his “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” concept reminded me that no discussion of technology can truly be said to be complete without mention of Douglas Adams. “The Salmon of Doubt”, published posthumously, included his set of rules describing human reactions to technologies:

The Salmon of Doubt

Source: Wikipedia

“1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

In the PBS interview Prensky makes several throwaway remarks about the future which go unchallenged: we might have less privacy but that we’ll grow accustomed to it; we’ll lose some things, like “flowery writing”, but we’ll gain others; Google search is wonderful but “the next thing that comes along will be even better”. Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants classification has been much criticized. Several of those criticisms, ranging from mild to severe, are referenced in The Digital Natives / Digital Immigrants Distinction Is Dead, Or At Least Dying. Mark Bullen’s blog, Next Gen Skeptic, points to several studies that contradict Prensky with hard research concluding that the next generation’s use of digital technologies is more complex than characterised and certainly not homogeneous. The argument that there is as much variation within the digital native or net generation as there is between generations is noted in an article in The Economist, The net generation, unplugged, which makes telling points about superficiality in respect of student familiarity with digital tools and the nature of online youth activism.

Second Thoughts: Language … again

In looking at Prenksy’s website I see that he refers to himself as a “Practial Visionary”, “World Influencer” and “Thought Leader”. Immediately I thought of this:

Shing & Berners-Lee

Source: Karen Twomey (via Twitter)

The inclination to excessive self-promotion online is pervasive. And unnecessary. Let the work speak for itself. Or at a minimum consign the more narcissistic twaddle to the back cover of the next book. Mind you I suspect it has been ever thus and the internet simply acts as amplifier and repeater.
Perhaps I am misconstruing biography as braggadocio. There I defer to the aforementioned Mr Adams: “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”