Can we ever feel at home?
Numerous terms that attempt to categorize various generations according to their technological and/or digital
affiliations have been coined. Within the educational internet, Marc Prensky's 2001 distinction
of digital immigrants versus digital natives, apparently first used (by him) in
a 2001 article of that same name, has become a popular, almost meme-like, means
of distinguishing between those born into the digital age and those whose primary
means of interacting with information is via ink on paper. Prensky doesn't pull
punches. He wants us to realize just how different those of us from earlier generations
are from those born into digitality:
It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous
environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students
think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.
These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize.
"Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, "says Dr.
Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment,
it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are
different from ours - as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this
is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have
changed.
Reading that brains have physically changed in such a short period of time causes
me to raise an eyebrow. (And I'm neither the only,
nor the first, to wonder whether this is a correct, or useful, metaphor.)
But not being an authority on what leads to the development of various brain structures
(far from it!), I have no reason not to defer to Dr. Berry's
expertise on the subject. If he says that experience affects those structures,
so be it. Still, telling us that "the sheer volume" of interaction with
the digital environment causes today's students to "think and process information
fundamentally differently" seems little more than headline catching hyperbole.
Prensky is probably aware that, enticing as his claims might be, not everyone
is going to be convinced. This is probably the reason that the
second part of Prensky's article (published two months after the first part)
attempts to establish an empirical basis for the claim of structural change in
the brain. Prensky offers quite a number of references to back up his claim. Again,
I'm far from an expert, but it's hard not to get the impression that just about
anything and everything that he's encountered that might somehow suggest something
along the lines of what he wants to show gets a footnote in order to strengthen
his argument. An examination of those footnotes, for instance, shows that at least
a couple of them come from the promotional publications of a New York financial
consultancy firm. What can I say? Though I'm a firm believer that someone doesn't
need to have a PhD attached to his or her name in order to be considered an expert,
when it comes to brain science, I tend to prefer something a
bit more academic.
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old
country