Dr. Who?
A Google search on Dr. Bruce D. Berry brings up quite a number of hits - almost
all of them within copies of Prensky's article, or quotes from it. The Baylor
College of Medicine web site (with which, Prensky tells us, as of 2001 Berry was
affiliated) doesn't seem to mention him at all. Berry may well be an accepted
authority on brain development, but, at least via the various searches I conducted
- via Google, via Google Scholar, and in a general library catalog - he doesn't
seem to have published anything related to brain research, or as far as I can
tell, on anything else. I may have missed something (maybe Prensky, and everybody
else since then, spelled his name wrong) but I get the feeling that Prensky happened
upon a quote that fit his needs and simply milked it for much
more than it was worth.
Perhaps what we have here is a case of digital immigrants imitating digital natives.
After all, few people would get particularly upset to find that a pupil had copied
a passage verbatim from the Wikipedia without checking a bit further up the source
chain to see if it was accurate, but were a teacher to do that it would be considered
unprofessional. But if the immigrants are going to adjust to the new digital reality,
it makes sense that they'll behave around information in the same way that the
natives do.
Go to: Can we every feel at home?,
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old
country