Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, and Me

In my favorite C.L. Moore story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” Moore writes about a time machine sent back to 1942. The tiny time machine is filled with toys (e.g. a human doll with peculiar organs, a four-dimensional wire maize, etc.). In 1942, the seven-year-old Scott Paradine and his two-year-old sister Emma begin playing with the toys. The toys rewire the children’s brains and open them up to a consciousness foreign to their parent’s.

It’s an intriguing idea; that the brains of the children are fundamentally different from their parents based on technological experiences that weren’t even possible when their parents were their age.
“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 (Prinski, 2001, p. 1).”

I am a digital immigrant. I have never held a smart phone, sent a tweet, or skyped. I can almost count on two hands the amount of text messages I have sent (many of which were written in complete sentences). Furthermore, I grew up in a rural town and went away to college to study an archaic discipline whose hey-day was sometime between the Astrolabe and the Watt steam engine.

Studying Theology I was exposed to countless theologians, who upon coming of age, girded up thier loins and jumped into hundred-year-old arguments to grapple with each other’s ideas and concepts (back when arguments could last hundreds of years). Who would have thought that while I was lost in a cirriculum of time-tested ideas I was being deprived of the necessary skills needed to teach, how serious was my technological depravity?

“It’s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language,” Marc Prensky warns (2001, p. 2).

If Prensky is right, then my undergraduate education is something equivalent to studying Mandarin Chinese to teach English in Germany. But I don’t agree, I think Prensky goes too far. Just because Digital Natives have “little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction,” does not mean we should throw all that to the wayside.

Paradoxically, Prinsky’s sentiment for Digital Natives sounds eerily too similar to the eight-tenth century figure known as the noble wild man. To the French, the wild man was someone alien to their customs and free from all the trappings of modern society. And so it is with Prinsky, the Digital Native is free from the trappings of linear, sequential thinking, and if the Digital Native fails to pay attention (“powers down”) we ought to understand that his intentions are only good and that all the fault lies on the instructor, whose weird “accent” is a stumbling block to his eager students.

As an English instructor I want to use technology as long as it helps in teaching. I want to utilize things like social media and smart boards, but I’m not interested in novelty. In my classes the students will still read from books and turn in printed papers.



Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On The Horizon (Vol. 9, No. 5).