It is amazing to me how, in all the hoo-haand debate these days about the decline ofeducation in the USA, we ignore the mostfundamental of its causes. Our students

have changed radically. Today’s students areno longer the people our educational systemwas designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changedincrementally from those of the past, norsimply changed their slang, clothes, bodyadornments, or styles, as has happenedbetween generations previously. A really bigdiscontinuity has taken place. One might evencall it a “singularity” – an event which changesthings so fundamentally that there is absolutelyno going back. This so-called “singularity” isthe arrival and rapid dissemination of digitaltechnology in the last decades of the twentiethcentury.

Today’s students – K-12 through college –represent the first generations to grow upwith this new technology. They have spenttheir entire lives surrounded by and usingcomputers, videogames, digital music players,video cams, cell phones, and all the other toysand tools of the digital age. Today’s averagecollege grads have spent fewer than 5,000hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000hours playing video games (not to mention20,000 hours watching TV). Computergames, e-mail, the Internet, cell phones and

instant messaging are integral parts of theirlives.

It is now clear that, as a result of thisubiquitous environment and the sheer volumeof their interaction with it, today’s studentsthink and process information fundamentallydifferently from their predecessors. Thesedifferences go far further and deeper thanmost educators suspect or realize. “Differentkinds of experiences lead to different brainstructures, “ says Dr Bruce D. Berry of BaylorCollege of Medicine. As we shall see in the nextinstallment, it is very likely that our students’brains have physically changed – and aredifferent from ours – as a result of how theygrew up. But whether or not this is literallytrue, we can say with certainty that theirthinking patterns have changed. I will get tohow they have changed in a minute.

What should we call these “new” studentsof today? Some refer to them as the N-(forNet)-gen or D-(for digital)-gen. But the mostuseful designation I have found for them isDigital Natives. Our students today are all“native speakers” of the digital language ofcomputers, video games and the Internet.

So what does that make the rest of us?Those of us who were not born into thedigital world but have, at some later point inour lives, become fascinated by and adoptedmany or most aspects of the new technology

T H E S T R A T E G I C P L A N N I N G R E S O U R C E F O R E D U C A T I O N P R O F E S S I O N A L S

September/October 2001Volume 9, Number 5

HORIZONtheO N

IN THIS ISSUE:Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Park 1Marc Prensky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

From the EditorOn the Horizon Broadens its Horizons– To Publish May Be To Perish?Tom P. Abeles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Legacy-based Thinking II: Resisting NewTools and CompetenciesArthur Harkins and George Kubik . . . . 6

A Voice from PariElena Liotta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Scanning the EnvironmentNextEd Offers Multiple Services forHitting Asian MarketplaceGeorge Lorenzo . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Book ReviewsIs it or isn’t it?Tom Abeles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Digital Natives, DigitalImmigrants Part 1Marc Prenskygames2train.com and Corporate Gameware LLCmarc@games2train.com

continued on page 3

are actively seeking alternatives to distribution oftraditional journal articles through a limited number ofpublishing houses that control rights and are consideredto be making exceedingly large profits through theircontrol of the distribution of what is seen, traditionally,as public knowledge. In addition to the academics,scholarly libraries have become concerned, as theproliferation of journals and the rapidly rising costsseverely pressure increasingly limited budgets.

Not only is the academic community faced withconfronting the issues of preprints, online journals andincreasing numbers of traditional publications, butalso the electronic medium adds what has traditionallybeen fugitive literature or knowledge on the fringe.This includes, in particular, materials from conferences,workshops and seminars that in the past havelanguished in the archives of small, specializedassociations and scholarly societies. Often relegated toobscure collections or recast for traditional venues,they now are becoming available through the Internetin a variety of formats.

The rise of semantic search engines makes thesevisible to the larger community of researchers andstudents, yet one cannot ascertain whether these arecritical or serve only to increase the informationoverload. We are facing a world where the cost per bitof information is getting cheaper, while the cost of auseful bit may be exceedingly costly. In such a world,where fiscal resources are limited, how does TheAcademy cope?

Addit ionally, campuses, many of which haveembraced the delivery of knowledge through a varietyof IT products and processes, including the Internet,are faced with shifting library usage, includingdecreased use of both the physical space and printresources. There is increasing concern that end userswill seek no further than electronic sources and thatthe traditional social functions of a campus librarymay yield to lessons learned from the larger booksellerswith their coffee-houses.

Thus, OTH itself becomes a probe into the venerablepublishing institution and a sensor as to what might lieahead in the arena of academic publishing. What,indeed, are the implications for The Academy? What isthe function of print in The Academy? What dotraditional publishing and the growing number ofscholarly electronic journals imply? With theexponential growth of various forms of e-learningaccessible to both on- and off-campus students, forwhat should the “building fund” be used – clicks orbricks? Do we see the future through the eyes of acyber immigrant or a cyber native?

On the Horizon will be looking in depth at these hardquestions and others, as our scanning radar is amplifiedwith the resources of Emerald and our expandedformat allows a more critical interpretation.l

are, and always will be, compared with them, DigitalImmigrants.

The importance of the distinction is this: As DigitalImmigrants learn – like all immigrants, some betterthan others – to adapt to their environment, theyalways retain, to some degree, their “accent”, that istheir foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent”can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet forinformation second rather than first, or in reading themanual for a program rather than assuming that theprogram itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folkwere “socialized” differently from their kids, and arenow in the process of learning a new language. And alanguage learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes intoa different part of the brain.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrantaccent. They include printing out your e-mail (or havingyour secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker”accent); needing to print out a document written on thecomputer in order to edit it (rather than just editing onthe screen); and bringing people physically into youroffice to see an interesting Web site (rather than justsending them the URL). I’m sure that you can think ofone or two examples of your own without much effort.My own favorite example is the “Did you get my e-mail?”phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can,and should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.”

But this is not just a joke. It’s very serious, becausethe single biggest problem facing education today isthat our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak anoutdated language (that of the pre-digital age), arestruggling to teach a population that speaks an entirelynew language.

This is obvious to the Digital Natives – school oftenfeels pretty much as if we’ve brought in a population ofheavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecturethem. They often can’t understand what the Immigrantsare saying. What does “dial” a number mean, anyway?

Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than justdescriptive, let me highlight some of the issues. DigitalNatives are used to receiving information really fast.They like to parallel process and multi-task. Theyprefer their graphics before their text rather than theopposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext).

On the Horizon � September/October 200133

Digital Natives, Digital ImmigrantsPart 1continued from page 1

A language learned later in life ,scientists tell us , goes into a differentpar t o f the brain

On the Horizon � September/October 20014

They function best when networked. They thrive oninstant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefergames to “serious” work. (Does any of this soundfamiliar?)

But Digital Immigrants typically have very littleappreciation for these new skills that the Natives haveacquired and perfected though years of interaction andpractice. These skills are almost totally foreign to theImmigrants, who themselves learned – and so chooseto teach – slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time,individually, and above all seriously. “My students justdon’t _____ like they used to,” Digital Immigranteducators grouse. I can’t get them to ____ or to ____.They have no appreciation for _____ or _____ . (Fill inthe blanks – there are a wide variety of choices.)

Digital Immigrants don’t believe that their studentscan learn successfully while watching TV or listening tomusic, because they (the Immigrants) can’t. Of coursenot – they didn’t practice this skill constantly for all oftheir formative years. Digital Immigrants think thatlearning can’t (or shouldn’t) be fun. Why should they?They didn’t spend their formative years learning withSesame Street.

Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers,the people sitting in their classes grew up on the“twitch speed” of video games and MTV. They are usedto the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music,phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops,beamed messages and instant messaging. They’ve beennetworked most or all of their lives. They have littlepatience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test”instruction.

Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners arethe same as they have always been, and that the samemethods that worked for the teachers when they werestudents will work for their students now. But thatassumption is no longer valid. Today’s learners aredifferent. “Www.hungry.com,” said a kindergartenstudent recently at lunch-time. “Every time I go toschool I have to power down,” complains a high-schoolstudent. Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, orthat they choose not to? Often from the Natives’ pointof view their Digital Immigrant instructors make theireducation not worth paying attention to comparedwith everything else they experience – and then theyblame them for not paying attention!

And, more and more, they won’t take it. “I went to ahighly ranked college where all the professors camefrom MIT,” says a former student. “But all they did was

read from their textbooks. I quit.” In the giddy Internetbubble of a only a few months ago – when jobs wereplentiful, especially in the areas where school offeredlittle help – this was a real possibility. But the dot-comdrop-outs are now returning to school. They will haveto confront once again the Immigrant/Native divide,and have even more trouble, g iven their recentexperiences. And that will make it even harder to teachthem – and all the Digital Natives already in the system– in the traditional fashion.

So what should happen? Should the Digital Nativestudents learn the old ways, or should their DigitalImmigrant educators learn the new? Unfortunately, nomatter how much the Immigrants may wish it, it ishighly unlikely that the Digital Natives will gobackwards. In the first place, it may be impossible –their brains may already be different. It also flies in theface of everything we know about cultural migration.Kids born into any new culture learn the new languageeasily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adultimmigrants accept that they don’t know about theirnew world and take advantage of their kids to helpthem learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousingabout how good things were in the “old country.”

So, unless we want to just forget about educatingDigital Natives until they grow up and do it themselves,we had better confront this issue. And in so doing weneed to reconsider both our methodology and ourcontent.

First, our methodology. Today’s teachers have tolearn to communicate in the language and style of theirstudents. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning ofwhat is important, or of good thinking skills. But itdoes mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel,with more random access, among other things.Educators might ask, “But how do we teach logic inthis fashion?” While it’s not immediately clear, we doneed to figure it out.

Second, our content. It seems to me that after the digital“singularity” there are now two kinds of content:“Legacy” content (to borrow the computer term for oldsystems) and “Future” content.

“Legacy” content includes reading, writing, arithmetic,logical thinking, understanding the writings and ideasof the past, etc. – all of our “traditional” curriculum. Itis of course still important, but it is from a different era.Some of it (such as logical thinking) will continue to be

4

Digital N atives are used to receiv ingin form ation rea lly fast.They like topara llel p rocess and m ulti-task

N ot-so-sm art im m igrants spend m ostof their tim e grousing about how goodthings w ere in the “old country”

important, but some (perhaps like Euclidean geometry)will become less so, as did Latin and Greek.

“Future” content is to a large extent, not surprisingly,digital and technological. But, while it includes software,hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, genomics, etc., italso includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languagesand other things that go with them. This “Future”content is extremely interesting to today’s students. Buthow many Digital Immigrants are prepared to teach it?Someone once suggested to me that kids should onlybe allowed to use computers in school that they havebuilt themselves. It’s a brilliant idea that is very doablefrom the point of view of the students’ capabilities. Butwho could teach it?

As educators, we need to be thinking about how toteach both Legacy and Future content in the languageof the Digital Natives. The first involves a majortranslation and change of methodology; the secondinvolves all that plus new content and thinking. It’s notactually clear to me which is harder – “learning newstuff ” or “learning new ways to do old stuff.” I suspectthat it’s the latter.

So we have to invent, but not necessarily fromscratch. Adapting materials to the language of DigitalNatives has already been done successfully. My ownpreference for teaching Digital Natives is to inventcomputer games to do the job, even for the mostserious content. After all, it’s an idiom with which mostof them are totally familiar.

Not long ago a group of professors showed up at mycompany with new computer-aided design (CAD)software they had developed for mechanical engineers.Their creation was so much better than what peoplewere currently using that they had assumed that theentire engineering world would quickly adopt it. Butinstead they encountered a lot of resistance, due inlarge part to the product’s extremely steep learningcurve – the software contained hundreds of newbuttons, options and approaches to master.

Their marketers, however, had a brilliant idea.Observing that the users of CAD software were almostexclusively male engineers between 20 and 30, theysaid, “Why not make the learning into a video game!”So we invented and created for them a computer gamein the “first person shooter” style of the consumergames Doom and Quake, called The Monkey WrenchConspiracy. Its player becomes an inter-galactic secretagent who has to save a space station from an attack bythe evil Dr Monkey Wrench. The only way to defeat

him is to use the CAD software, which the learner mustemploy to build tools, fix weapons, and defeat booby-traps. There is one hour of game time, plus 30 “tasks,”which can take from 15 minutes to several hours,depending on one’s experience level.

Monkey Wrench has been phenomenally successful ingetting young people interested in learning the software.It is widely used by engineering students around theworld, with over 1 million copies of the game in printin several languages. But, while the game was easy formy Digital Native staff to invent, creating the contentturned out to be more difficult for the professors, whowere used to teaching courses that started with “Lesson1 – the Interface.” We asked them instead to create aseries of graded tasks, into which the skills to belearned were embedded. The professors had made five-to-ten-minute movies to illustrate key concepts; weasked them to cut them to under 30 seconds. Theprofessors insisted that the learners do all the tasks inorder; we asked them to allow random access. Theywanted a slow, academic pace; we wanted speed andurgency (we hired a Hollywood scriptwriter to providethis.) They wanted written instructions; we wantedcomputer movies. They wanted the tradit ionalpedagogical language of “learning objectives,”“mastery”,etc. (e.g. “in this exercise you will learn …”); our goalwas to completely eliminate any language that evensmacked of education.

In the end the professors and their staff came throughbrilliantly but because of the large mind-shift requiredit took them twice as long as we had expected. As theysaw the approach working, though, the new “DigitalNative” methodology became their model for moreand more teaching – both in and out of games – andtheir development speed increased dramatically.

Similar rethinking needs to be applied to all subjectsat all levels. Although most attempts at “edutainment”to date have essentially failed from both the educationand the entertainment perspective, we can – and will, Ipredict – do much better.

In math, for example, the debate must no longer beabout whether to use calculators and computers – theyare a part of the Digital Natives’ world – but ratherhow to use them to instill the things that are useful tohave internalized, from key skills and concepts to themultiplication tables. We should be focusing on “futuremath” – approximation, statistics, binary thinking.

On the Horizon � September/October 200155

“Legacy” content includes reading,writing , arithm etic , logical thinking ,understanding the w ritings and ideasof the past

Their creation was so m uch betterthan w hat peop le were currently using that they had assum ed that theentire eng ineering w orld w ould quicklyadopt it

On the Horizon � September/October 20016

In geography – which is all but ignored these days –there is no reason why a generation that can memorizeover 100 Pokémon characters with all theircharacteristics, history and evolution can’t learn thenames, populations, capitals and relationships of all the101 nations in the world. It just depends on how it ispresented.

We need to invent Digital Native methodologies forall subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.The process has already begun – I know collegeprofessors inventing games for teaching subjectsranging from math to engineering to the SpanishInquisition. We need to find ways of publicizing andspreading their successes.

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigranteducators is “this approach is great for facts, but itwouldn’t work for ‘my subject.’” Nonsense. This is justrationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks Inow include “thought experiments”, where I inviteprofessors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic,and I attempt – on the spot – to invent a game or otherDigital Native method for learning i t. Classicalphilosophy? Create a game in which the philosophersdebate and the learners have to pick out what eachwould say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation wherestudents role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or onewhere they can experience the true horror of thecamps, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List. It’sjust dumb (and lazy) of educators – not to mentionineffective – to presume that (despite their traditions)the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, andthat the Digital Natives’ “language” is not as capable astheir own of encompassing any and every idea.

So if Digital Immigrant educators really want toreach Digital Natives – i.e. all their students – they willhave to change. It’s high time for them to stop theirgrousing and, as the Nike motto of the Digital Nativegeneration says, “Just do it!” They will succeed in thelong run – and their successes will come that muchsooner if their administrators support them.

Next issueThe scientific evidence behind the Digital Natives’thinking changes, and the evidence that Digital Native-style learning works!

NOTE

Marc Prensky is the author of Digital Game-BasedLearning (McGraw-Hill, 2001) and Founder and CEOof Games2Train.com The Monkey Wrench ConspiracyCD can be purchased for $10 at www.games2train.com/site/html/tutor.htmll

REFERENCE

Prensky, M. (2001), Digital Game-Based Learning,McGraw-Hill.

IntroductionThis is the sixth article in our series projecting a shiftfrom learning to perform to performing to learn. Thisarticle summarizes and comments upon the last ofthree story-writing exercises undertaken by 166Minnesota public school administrators in late January2001.

In all of our articles we have argued thatperformance-based learning (PBL) can effectivelycreate learning in the context of tasks supported bydistributed competence (DC) software. We have

submitted that PBL is a process that encourageslearning based on authentic performances supportedby DC software, and that such learning should lead toperformance upgrades and innovations in taskconception and accomplishment. Such upgrades andinnovations are not guaranteed; they are potentials inthe futures of human performers and their networkedDC software.

How did the public school administrators in ourworkshop sample respond to the prospects of PBL inboth the school and the work venues? Were theyhopeful that PBL-driven schools might produce betterprospects for the workforce? Could these prospects beproduced earlier, and demonstrate superior ability toperform tasks and compete successfully against newand incumbent workers?

We will examine the results of the StoryTech thatdealt with these issues, and then comment on thequalities of PBL that distinguish it from contemporaryeducational practices, even as the workforce demonstratesits increasing reliance on PBL.

6

Legacy-basedThinking II: ResistingNew Tools andCompetenciesArthur HarkinsUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesotaharki001@umn.edu

George KubikUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesotakubi0021@um n.edu

PBL can effectively crea te learning inthe context of tasks supported by D Csoftware