Marc Prensky Lets Be Digital Multipliers 2008 Marc Prensky _____________________________________________________________________________
Lets Be Digital Multipliers
Eliminating the Digital Divide Is Something Educators Can Do

By Marc Prensky

Published in Educational Technology, Jan-Feb 2009 [1216 words]
Whenever I speak to educators I typically get some variation of the digital
divide question: I want to use technology, but my students dont all have equal access to it. Many (or some) dont have computers at home. Some (or many) dont own a cell phone. Some of their families cant afford monthly connection charges. By requiring they use this technology, am I not depriving these kids of an equal education? Clearly, the desire to not deprive any child of a good, and equal, education is laudable, and represents the best of intentions. But in some cases, our good intentions can lead us to behaviors that are not in the best interests of all our students. An example of this is the following, which I once heard a teacher say. 29 of my students have computers at home, but one doesnt. So I dont assign computer homework, because it wouldnt be fair to that student. What about the other 29 students? Do we deprive 29 to be fair to one? Or do we find another solution for the one? Whether our schools, or our students, can afford it or not, all todays students need technology. Already, truck drivers have GPS, computers and companyprovided cell phones. Delivery people have hand-helds. People in business are increasingly tethered to their Blackberries. No matter how old-school one is in thinking that the tools of the past are sufficient for a good education, it does not take much foresight to realize that most work in the future will be technology-mediated.
I think we should scrounge, beg, borrow and steal (figuratively) to get at least some technology to every student who doesnt have access to it, as quickly and as often as possible. But, of course, we cant just go out, as individuals and buy the technology for those who dont have it. So what do we do to bridge, and eliminate, the digital divide in our schools and our students? Accept Some Inequality First, its important to understand that not every student needs to have the same exact technology. Some think that school (or at least public school) should make sure every student has exactly the same things: the same pens, pencils or paper, the same textbooks, the same lunch, even, in some places, the same clothing (i.e. uniforms.) We either provide all of these things to all students at public expense, or we dont use them. This may make sense for some things. But I dont think it makes sense for digital technology. Digital technology access is unequal by its nature or at least by the way we make and sell it and always will be. We can set a floor a set of minimum specifications but some people will always want more. There is a huge variety of feature choices available, and each device is a set of tradeoffs, enabling every person to get the feature set he or she prefers and can afford. Few of us have the same phones, computers, stereos, speakers, etc, nor would we want to. So the best solution may not be providing the same technology to every student, but rather finding accommodations for those who dont have their own. Increasingly, in the workplace, we see young workers wanting to use their own technology rather than what is provided. While getting cheaper (the $200 computer is here!) technology still costs money, which means that not everyone will get it in the same way, any more than everyone gets to work or is able to dress the same way. So perhaps we should not care exactly which technology our students use, and we should let the ones who have more use it. But we should make sure they are all using something. So What Can We Do? What we must be concerned about is students wanting or needing access to a minimal level of digital technology and not being able to get it. If we, as educators, make it our business to see that every student has enough access, rather than equal access to digital technology, and is required to use their technology every day for difficult, stimulating, collaborative, world

involving projects, I think many, if not most of our digital divide issues will go away. Here are some suggestions for accomplishing this without more money from the administration, and without spending money from our own pockets. First, lets be sure we use all the technology we do have at hand, and that it is the students who are using it. If there is an electronic whiteboard, the students should be using it to present, not the teacher. If some of our students have their own laptops or cell phones, lets make use of them. Next, lets maximize sharing. If not everyone in the class has a particular piece of technology, a teacher can put students into groups around a device, such as a computer or cell phone. The lesson/tasks can be structured in such a way that every student is required to use the device, with students teaching their peers and taking responsibility for all students knowing how to use the technology. Students can also share devices, keeping their own work on cheap USB drives. Then, lets increase access time. Places where all students can access technology, such as libraries and computer labs, should be kept open as long as possible ideally every night until midnight and on weekends. If transportation or safety is an issue, we can find volunteers to run carpools. Finally, lets do our best to get some technology for those who dont have access to it. Building ones own computer is inexpensive and easy, not to mention a great learning experience. Amazing bargains are available on eBay and other places online. Perfectly good cell phones and computers are thrown away and recycled regularly. With open source, Google Docs and shareware, software costs have dropped radically or disappeared. Plenty of individuals and foundations are willing to donate. Lets use our creativity to get hold of as much of this stuff as possible. And then lets use the students to maintain it and keep it useable.
If we (and our students) are willing to be creative, I see no reason why there should be a digital divide at all anywhere in the U.S. As educators, we should take it as our responsibility to see that this no longer happens. It is easy to pass off eliminating the digital divide as someone elses responsibility, but it is really our own. This is a clear place where educators can be a big part of the solution even without additional funding. I suggest we begin thinking of

ourselves as digital multipliers i.e. people who find creative solutions that bring every student, no matter what his or her background or income level, into the digital world and get the job done. Of course, there is also a second, more subtle, cause of the digital divide. Certain educators, who are themselves afraid of the technology, are not making the best efforts they could to have all their students use technology as much as possible. Although this is often justified in our kids dont need technology to think language, it is really just another form of digital division and deprivation. It must be fought.
Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker, writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw Hill, 2001) and Dont Bother Me, Mom, Im Learning (Paragon House, 2006). Marc is the founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning company, whose clients include IBM, Bank of America, Pfizer , the U.S. Department of Defense and the LA and Florida Virtual Schools. He is also the creator of the sites www.SocialImpactGames.com, and www.GamesParentsTeachers.com. Marc holds an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in Teaching from Yale. More of his writings can be found at www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp. Marc can be contacted at marc@games2train.com.

The Newsletter of Western Center for Microcomputers in Special Education, Inc.
Just who are these Digital Natives?
(Are any of them in Special Education?)
Educating Digital Natives in Analog Schools, Part III

by Dr. Richard E. Riedl

Editorial comment: In recent issues, Dr. Richard Riedl has been discussing the world of Digital Natives, todays students for whom technology seems as natural as breathing. His latest article leads the reader to ask whether the issues facing Digital Natives also affect students in Special Education. This question will be addressed here, and in future installments. Obviously, not every student with special needs has the opportunity to navigate in a high-tech world. Nonetheless, some students skilled in technology may also fall into the largest category of Special Education: learning disabilities. In fact, some of the most brilliant personalities in the technology field were considered atypical learners, even ADD, during their school years; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak come to mind. At the far end of the scale, some children with autism or Aspergers syndrome may be adept at technology, if not social skills, and may be thrust into inclusive settings where they crave peer acceptance with all the trimmings. Some children with physical disabilities may rely on technology to keep pace with or surpass their classmates. Indeed, most students in Special Education may wish to dress and act just like their peers, not to mention owning and using the same gadgets. The new digital world creates new challenges for all. Are learning disabilities exacerbated or ameliorated by tehnology? (Do LD children even have disabilities, or are they simply misfits an inflexible educational system?) Are students with marginal English skills, or students with low eco nomic status, penalized by peer pressure to have the latest and flashiest devices? Above all, are we Digital Immigrants (as Dick Riedl has so aptly dubbed us) able to meet the needs of Digital Natives, in or out of Special Ed, while at the same time scrambling to achieve increasingly rigid standards and struggling with budget cuts? Fortunately, this article is part of a continuing series! Find out below if these children really are different, or if their differences are an illusion; stay tuned in future issues to consider how (or if) we and our schools may serve these students and still cope with todays realities.
We have learned that we are digital immigrants and explored the steps we need to take to become recovering digital immigrants. But just who are these digital natives we need to teach? Arent they just children just like the children our schools have always taught? Marc Prensky is credited with coining the term digital native in 2001. Since then there has been much discussion about this term and whether it describes a group of young people who are truly different from people who have come before them, or not. Predictably, opinions range from no difference (we are just fooling ourselves into thinking we need to treat them any differently from anybody else), to an hypothesis that suggests that the type of activity digital natives engage in is actually changing the way their brain works. A simple Google search on brain research and digital natives draws the usual huge number of hits , a huge array of opinions, and a few reports on studies that purport to prove one side or the other (a colleague once said that searching the Internet is like trying to take a sip from a fire hose). An example is a report on a presentation made by Dr. Gary Small, director of UCLAs Memory and Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and UCLAs Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging (he must have a very large business card to fit all of that on) to supporters of the Semel Institute in the Faculty and Staff news section of UCLA Today: h t t p : / / w w w. t o d a y. u c l a. e d u / p o r t a l / u t / _ g a r y small-ibrain.aspx [Digital natives] exposure [to digital technology] is rewiring their brain's neural circuitry, heightening skills like multi-tasking, complex reasoning and decision-making, Small said. But there's a down side: All that tech time diminishes people skills, including important emotional aptitudes like empathy. The good news in his report for us digital immigrants is that there is evidence that working with computers tends to help our memory and mental flexibility. So, when we talk about teaching digital natives, are we talking about working with children who are really just the same as always, maybe a bit lazy because they dont go outside as much, dont interact with people as much, and who need to be shaped up? Or are we talking about teaching children whose brains work completely differently from ours? Rather than try to answer that question at this point, lets explore what we do know.

The World of the Digital Native
Alan Kay, a pioneering computer scientist and currently President of Viewpoints Research Institute, tells us that technology is anything invented after we were born (http://www.viewpointsresearch.org). So, if that is true, digital natives look at us as if we were crazy when we talk about computers as technology. Computers are devices that are just as common to digital natives as an automobile is to us. Technology? No, just part of the world. Digital natives are children who have never known a world without: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Personal computers/laptop computers High speed Internet Cell phones PDAs and iPods WiFi IM and Text Messaging Digital Cameras MMORPGs (Dont know what these are? Try Googling it.)*
mation in multiple forms. They assume they can produce their own movies, web pages, blogs, and more. But lets pause for a moment here to think about something that is very important. We know that not all children have access to the Internet or spiffy new digital toys. So they cant be digital natives, right? Actually, being a digital native doesnt depend on the toys you play with. Remember, children are growing up in a world in which all of these things are happening. Children are aware of them as a normal part of the world they live in, regardless of the opportunities they have to participate in their use. Just as when we digital immigrants were very aware of the ability to fly all over the world in jets and assumed that was part of the world and how things were done, even if we never flew, so digital natives are aware of the world they live in. What we call technology is not technology to them. It is the way the world is.
The Future for Digital Natives
While digital natives may not be thinking much about their future (most children dont, or at least dont think about what I would call the future, meaning more than whom Im going to talk to tonight), we can talk about it, and it doesnt take much thought to realize that it is a fair assumption that their future will be very different from our present. They are growing up in a global society in which there will be greater competition in production of goods and services. Well-educated people from all over the world are seeking to do the job. International connectivity through the Internet breaks down barriers and allows an accountant in India to do the books for a firm in Chicago. Everybody will be more obviously interdependent with people from all over the world. There will be a need to work closely with people who have different specializations from many very different places and from very different cultures and speaking diff e rent languages or, much to the chagrin of Americans, speaking English with many different accents. And people are already changing careers with a frequency that didnt exist just a few years ago. If the trend continues we can expect digital natives to change careers careers, not jobs as many as ten times in a lifetime. And many of these careers have not yet been created. In fact, they may not be created until the mid-work life or later of todays children. Todays digital natives may need to reinvent themselves many times. Digital natives will live in a world that has many forms and sources of information, probably even more than we think

To them, these things and a plethora of other digital devices and applications are nothing special, even the new ones that seem to pop into existence almost every month. Digital Natives assume the trends of digital technologies. They know that digital devices will get smaller, faster and more powerful. They know that digital devices will become more integrated; our iPods already do email. Our phones already browse the web, take pictures, act as GPS devices, and more. This is only the beginning of the integration of separate digital tools, and natives understand that and expect it. Digital natives assume 24/7 communications technologies. They are completely comfortable with and expect interactive communications wherever and whenever they are and are making new rules about when and how you communicate with other people. They expect to have access to information whenever and wherever they want. Going to the library is Stone Age. Not being connected is Twentieth Century. Not being able to talk or text with a friend anytime and anyplace is just not acceptable. Digital natives think in terms of multi-tasking and assume multiple forms of input/output. If they can, they do homework, IM friends, and talk on the phone all at the same time and dont understand why their parents think they are just goofing off. They expect information to come in multiple forms; text, image, sound, etc., and want to produce infor-
* Ed. note: I had better luck with Wikipedia.com: A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a genre of computer roleplaying games (CRPGs) in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. Got that?
we are flooded with today. The Internet has provided us with many blessings when it comes to access to information and access for many different people to provide information. It also has provided many things to be concerned about. The whole notion of how one determines what sources of information are to be trusted is critical as is how to avoid the temptations to seek information that only supports your views or values. (No, sorry, Im not going to touch the whole issue of what children should have access to here. That is a whole can of worms on its own.) The world of the digital native will be very different socially and politically. We just witnessed an election that featured the use of the interconnectivity of our world in new ways, and we are sure to see even more new and innovative ways develop in future elections. Digital natives are already exploring very different social contexts. We digital immigrants think many young people are anti-social, just sitting in front of their computer screens isolated from human contact. But they are, more often than not, engaging in a very different form of social interaction, one that we often dont understand and are often ready to condemn.
That is only hypothesis, supported by some very significant trend lines, still not something we know. But we owe it to our children to take that into account and to ask how we can prepare them for that unknown world. The digital native also expects to interact with todays world very differently than we do. Email is old stuff that old people use a lot, not nearly interactive enough (in the same way some of us got impatient trying to deal with snail mail after we learned how to use email). They come to our schools understanding the connectivity of the world and the multiple forms of interactivity. But do our schools understand those things? Ive written before and will continue to write that our schools are industrial age institutions with an agricultural age calendar. Can we educate for the 21st century in these institutions? Our schools operate as pre-digital age entities. We now have digital natives in them. Do schools need to accommodate digital natives? If so, then how? These are questions that are critical to all of us and, no surprise here I suppose, is what I will address in the next issue of The Catalyst.

Dr. Richard E. (Dick) Riedl, Chairman, Department of Leadership & Educational Studies, Reich College of Education, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608, (704) 262-2328 riedlre@appstate.edu Ed. Note: A Digital Native has invaded my family, in the person of my 16-year-old grandson. He does things to my computer and cell phone that I do not understand. He tells me that email is for the older generation. He has taught me how to text, but it has taken a long time to learn and I still have to look at the keypad, even though he picked one with larger display for the mature user. (It took me weeks to find the apostrophe). If I want to write him at greater length, I have to send him a text message telling him to check his email; otherwise he doesnt. He can maintain eye contact and converse with me while his thumbs are tapping on his BlackBerry or scrolling his iPod touch. He masters new technology instantly. He is also a good student, sociable, and fun. Is his brain wired differently? Im not sure, but sometimes I do wonder about an evolutionary leap, or perhaps a visi tor from a more advanced planet
Educating Digital Natives
Whether the brain of the digital native is being rewired or not, by simply looking at the world they live in and the world they will live in when they leave schooling (assuming our current schooling system survives), we need to take a sharp look at our schools. We dont know what the world will look like when todays child becomes an adult. To a degree that has always been true, but for the most part, my grandparents could assume the world of my parents was going to be substantially like the world they knew. And my parents held the same belief about the world in which I would become an adult. My world is quite a bit different than what my parents would have expected and, if things keep going as they have been, the changes will accelerate. The world in which todays children become adults will be very different from the world we know.
San Francisco Chronicle, 4/01/07. Reprinted with permis sion of Zits, Zits Partnership, King Features Syndicate.