Land of Lime

Here is a scary thought. My students are and will remain mostly digital natives, who fit into the following description:

Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen—all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today’s “Digital Native” students.

My friend Scott Payne has an interesting essay entitled “Evolutionary Trajectories, Internet-mediated Expression, and Language Education”, in which he has a brief discussion of digital natives and immigrants; Scott quotes the above paragraph from the research of M. Presky.

Today, Ken Sadowski referred to both these categories in a presentation at the ‘Colloquium on Language Instruction and Technology’, which, as the regulars may remember, is my ‘baby’ for the Spring Quarter in Chicago.

What are the implications for our own practice of teaching? Sure, we want to take the changing profile of the learners/students and personally, I don’t find adapting my classroom a great challenge. Using chat or skype or podcasting in the class room doesn’t produce any anxiety in me. But if you speak of forms of socialization, then that’s a different matter.