Monday, June 25, 2012

Are we doomed as an immigrant

I related to this article as an immigrant, I grew-up in a time where Atari was the most we had to play with, games like; Pong, Defender, and Space invaders. The Digital Divide: Digital natives, Digital immigrants an article in our class reading by Marc Prensky, it pretty much talks of the whole of pop culture and how the N-gen or the D-gen is taking over and us immigrants either need to catch-up or be left behind. I thought this was the thesis statement in this article,  " Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." "They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age." Most educators of the current times are immigrants and want to teach as they were taught, we are finding out that this isn't working." 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because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language." students of today think and process information from their predecessors, it's likely due to the fact that students brains have physically changed, are different from ours, because of how they have grown up. Basically it boils down to whether we or me as an immigrant need to learn the language of the N-gen so that we don't fall behind and become extinct to the changing world around us. We must adapt. We can't get rid of all the things that the immigrants know and have to teach all. Some of these things are necessary to learn. The methods in which they are taught may have to be updated so that it is easier and more interesting, to keep the students attention, so they learn the way they need to. Games have become a big tool in the learning process," first person shooter" style has become very popular. The whole idea here is that todays students need things to come to them faster , that is the way they are used to recieving things in the digital era. They have learned via the internet and computer skills and video games. So, we need to start teaching them the way they are accustomed to learning. That is what the author gives to us in this article, examples of how the old ways are no longer working for this generation. We need to start using the ways of the new generation to teach the new generation. The next article in the book goes on to talk more about the whole native, immigrant debate, haven't read that one just yet, Marc Prensky also gives a list of notes at the end of the article on many different sources for this topic. Youtube has a video on this like; "The world has changed, Students have changed, is education changing?" and many others. I also looked into a few other articles for and against the idea of education not being up to par for todays students. Google has a lot of stuff on the Digital native and the education system.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

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