A growing body of literature argues that, in Steven Jones' words, EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR US. Television is good for us: makes us smarter. James Paul Gee studies WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT LEARNING AND LITERACY, and concludes that they have a lot to teach us. And yet... And yet there is the possibility that the ability of college graduates to read complex materials is declining sharply. Or so says the recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy. If the Assessment's findings hold up, the remaining question is, of course: Is the ability to read complex texts important in the 21st century? And if it is, are the digital natives well equipped for survival, much less leadership, in the 21st century? One popular and increasingly influential retailer of the thesis that the new generation of cell phone and iPod and computer communicators is a new breed of human with facilities adapted to work and citizenship in the 21st century is Mark Prensky Here is Prensky: <<Natives and Immigrants Why do I call these young computer enthusiasts and organizational activists "digital natives"? Think about the extraordinary cumulative digital experiences of each of these future business, military, and government leaders: an average of close to 10,000 hours playing video games; more than 200,000 e-mails and instant messages sent and received; nearly 10,000 hours of talking, playing games, and using data on cell phones; more than 20,000 hours spent watching TV (much of it jump-cut-laden MTV); almost 500,000 commercials seen - all before they finished college. At most, they've logged only 5,000 hours of book reading. This generation is better than any before at absorbing information and making decisions quickly, as well as at multitasking and parallel processing. In contrast, people age 30 or older are "digital immigrants" because they can never be as fluent in technology as a native who was born into it. You can see it in the digital immigrants' "accent" - whether it is printing out e-mails or typing with fingers rather than thumbs. Have you ever noticed that digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, don't talk about "information overload"? Rather, they crave more information.>> "Multitasking" means to Prensky the ability to IM with friends while attending to a college lecture or reading a book. Or getting all that a television documentary has to offer while attending to the captions scrolling below. College faculty throughout the US, and perhaps elsewhere where the new media are ubiquitous, will testify to the difficulty the digital natives have with the printed word. They resist reading even moderately difficult texts, and often refuse to buy textbooks, sometimes acknowledging that the words on the pages make little or no sense to them. The digital natives may be analog immigrants If this is so, if there are several grains of truth here, what should our colleges and universities do about the New Illiteracy? Two possibilities quickly suggest themselves. The first: acknowledge that print literacy is dissolving and eroding and morphing into something else, and convert instruction and instructional media to that something else. The second: acknowledge that print literacy is the central literacy needed by those who function in the 21st century, and turn the attention of our best minds to the problem of how to save and enhance it. Steve Eskow [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
