Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: 6 Take-Aways

As you move through your career a funny thing happens, or at least it happened to me.

For a long, long time, I always felt like the youngest person at work. The youngest person on the team. The youngest person in management. I could look around the room in any meeting I happened to be in and think: older, older, older. . .whoa, way older.

Then, one day, it happened. I suddenly felt like the oldest person in the room. I’d look around and, despite my best efforts, all I’d see is younger, younger, younger. . .whoa, way younger.

And, to make matters worse, people would look at me when I spoke like I actually knew what I was talking about. (That’s scary, and the topic of an entirely different article.)

Somehow, over 25 years, I missed entirely the “I’m about average age" period, and I’m still not sure how that happened.

This all gets reinforced, and dramatically so, when we interview someone for a position in the company who happens to have ten solid years experience and graduated from college in 1996.

The math doesn’t add up. 1996 was just the other day.

Or we’ll hire a new software programmer who was born in 1984.

More bad math. An impossibility. (Worse still, I remember reading George Orwell's 1984 in school and worrying that the future might really be like that.)

So, given these ugly turn of events in my own life, it was with great interest that I read Marc Prensky’s article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, written in 2001. Prensky is an author, speaker and consultant, and designs games for education and learning. In this article, which is heavily quoted around the web, he talks about the “new” relationship between students and teachers, and between students and the educational system in which they are planted.

It’s abundantly clear to me that Prensky’s theories have significant applicability to today’s workplace as well as schools.

Prenskey starts with the notion that

our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past. . .A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity”—an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

If you are in your late forties or older—and this is an enormous group of baby-boomers now moving into senior executive positions, positions they will occupy for the next generation—you probably were taught to use a slide rule in college. In fact, you were possibly one of the few classes ever to go through the American education system to own a slide rule and a calculator, though the calculator would have been considered “cheating” if used in any serious way for homework or tests. (How would you ever learn math if you used a calculator?)

You undoubtedly sent stacks of cards to the computer lab to run your programs, and were delighted when you could store some simple programs on a cassette memory tape from Radio Shack, or found that the paper strip that held your BASIC program could be threaded through the machine without tearing.

When you had to look something up you went to the library, which had books.

For the first third-to-half of your career there was no computer on your desk, no email. You sent your hand-written reports to the typing pool.

The typing pool had no water, by the way.

And you would one day find that pushing buttons on a phone was faster than dialing.

All those quaint customs that we late Baby Boomers practiced back in the “old country.” And the early Baby Boomers, those born right after WWII—well, some of them never made it out of the “old country,” technologically speaking.

Prensky claims in his article that, given the sheer volume of technology that surrounds students,

they 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."

That one should bring you up short: Not only are the young folks being hired today steeped in technology, not only do they consider typewriters and record players and slide rules the stuff of attics and museums, but their brains may be structured differently.

You know that headache you get in the afternoon from incoming email and phone calls and web searches, when you feel like your office has been dropped into an MTV video? What if your brain grew up on that stuff and got even stronger the more you did it? What if your brain worked best when your ears were plugged into music from an iPod and your hands held a joystick?

(And yes, MTV used to play music videos. Just another sign of an immigrant.)

The analogy Prensky uses to describe these differences is one with which are all familiar:

The most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. So what does that make the rest of us? Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital Immigrants.

In fact, the customs and ways that Digital Immigrants retain will make you smile: Reading directions before trying the software. Calling to be sure an email made it. Editing an electronic document by printing, marking it up, and then typing back into the document.

What would those habits be in business? Have you ever heard of a manager complaining he or she gets “too much email”? Often. Have you ever heard a teenager complain that he gets too much email? Never. Natives want to see everything and will quickly delete what they don’t like; immigrants want their senders to censor what they send so the immigrant doesn’t have to deal with it. Worse still: “I don’t do email.” Or, “I can’t understand why you would email when you can call.” Or, “Text messaging is just a distraction.”

How about this: If you take the time to punctuate your email, you are likely a Digitial Immigrant. If you skip the punctuation and spelling etiquette for speed and content, you are probably a Native.

Having a secretary print email to read it. Having her type responses.

For that matter, having a secretary.

The list goes on. The natives are coming and the immigrants are hanging on to their old ways as best then can.

I’m going to list a few good, short take-aways from Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, reminding you that Prensky will frame them in educational terms to demonstrate the gap between students and teachers. But I would encourage you (late Baby Boomers especially) to think about how a 23-year old software digital native feels coming into your company. Are the accents strong or weak? It would be worth asking a group of them sometime over lunch, wouldn’t it?

Here are the take-aways:

1. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work.

2. These skills are almost totally foreign to the Immigrants, who themselves learned—and so choose to teach---slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously.

3. Digital Immigrants don’t believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can’t. Of course not—they didn’t practice this skill constantly for all of their formative years.

4. “Every time I go to school I have to power down,” complains a high-school student.

5. Unfortunately, no matter how much the Immigrants may wish it, it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards. In the first place, it may be impossible—their brains may already be different. It also flies in the face of everything we know about cultural immigration.

6. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate.

Incidentally, now that I have children in school, one of the Immigrant "accents" I hear most often is around Wikipedia, which is still not allowed as a source for research papers. It's unsubstantiated, you know.

I knew a history teacher once who wrote about 25 articles for Encyclopedia Britannica. He happened to be a socialist. Maybe a communist. But at least his articles were substantiated.

I give the wiki accent, hmmm. . .five years to disappear.

Meet you right here five years from now and we'll see.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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