Prensky and Spiegel

In 2001, when Marc Prensky called attention to a widening digital literacy divide between students and teachers, he distinguished the two groups as digital natives and digital immigrants in the sense that the dawn of the digital age preceded the students’ birth (natives), while the teachers (immigrants) migrated to the skills on an as-needed basis. The terminology is problematic for dredging up racist imagery of indigenous people v. actual immigrants who hold various cultural values and traditions. I imagine this imagery attracted attention to Prensky’s hypothesis. I struggled to find a better metaphor after referencing the thesaurus. I read that Prensky moved away from “digital native/immigrant” terminology to “digital wisdom/resident” terminology in 2009.

Other paradigms introduced in class offered more nuanced, and less problematic labels. I found myself identifying as a “techno-traditionalist” in between “augmentation” and “modification” on the SAMR scale, which had me feeling pretty good, until I identified with the “digital immigrant” description Pensky offered.

In her 2021 essay, Jennifer Spiegel addresses how access to technology is a major factor in digital literacy and challenges an assumption that Prensky’s hypothesis likely stimulated: that teachers can assume digital proficiency among their students based on birth year. Spiegel says, “The term ‘digital native’ implies that the native is both comfortable with and adept at using multiple forms of technology. This has been proven by multiple scholars to be untrue and in some cases counterproductive to the learning process (Helsper & Eynon, 2010; Wong, 2015).” Spiegel further goes on to say that many students “are quite adept at creating films, producing music, and creating other content that they publish online. However, simply because they have the ability to do this does not mean that they can analyze their own content when considering audience or occasion, determine their own biases, or even know to which platform is best to contribute their creations.” This all rings true based on my perceptions about the media the youth around me are engaging in.

Technology is ever-evolving and its use in the classroom should not be predicated by assumptions about students’ (nor teachers’) proficiency. It seems with any type of learning, teachers need to begin at the beginning, though that starting place can be different for each student. So, teachers must be curious about each student’s experience with various technologies. This reminded me of my comment in class about letter-writing etiquette being taught in school. Teachers would literally get everyone on the same page before assigning them a pen pal.

Spiegel’s conclusion is a valuable one: “Students must engage in digital and traditional learning opportunities, be required to engage in academic self-reflection and analysis of their own work and the works of others, and be taught foundational technology skills and philosophies of technology so that they may flourish in the social, cultural, political, and occupational worlds that await them.”