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Yesterday afternoon, I got to spend some time with a really thoughtful group of teachers in a local M.A.T. program, talking about teaching with technology. Midway through the afternoon, we fell into a discussion of the idea of digital natives and digital immigrants. And I had an epiphany that transformed how I think about explaining the fallacy of the digital generation gap.

The Complicated Abstract Reasoning Argument

This is often a sore spot for me: I see teachers bemoaning their own role as digital immigrants — they’ll never be able to keep up with their digital native students, who know so, so, so much about technology. I don’t buy this for an instant: I’ve worked with middle and high school students for a long time, and I am constantly appalled at the shockingly low level of technological literacy, media savvy and generally poor levels of critical thought demonstrated by teenagers. They’re not bad kids — it’s just that the car rental agencies are right: they won’t have any executive function until they’re 25 — that part of the braing ain’t physically there. It’s about where teenagers are at, developmentally and biologically.

Therefore, to say that these “digital natives” will outpace us is a fallacy: they know how to do things that are fun, but usually inconsequential (and here I must pause to salute students, teachers and individuals are the exceptions that prove the rule). The role of the digital immigrant teacher is to do the same thing that teachers have been doing since time immemorial: challenging our students to think a bit harder, analyze a bit more critically, and generally become less naive and more savvy — and hopefully a bit more knowledgeable about our own discipline. Note that technology and the digital divide don’t even come into play there: we digital immigrant teachers can teach this without needing to be “more digitally native” than our students. We don’t need to be the sage on the stage making the computer sing and dance: we just need to model critical thought processes and help our students aspire to be a bit more mature.

Immigration and Naturalization

That’s a longwinded way of saying what came to me naturally yesterday afternoon, in a room where the majority of the teachers were Israeli immigrants: let’s think about immigration in the real world. Let’s think about the naturalization process, and how much concrete information immigrants need to learn to become US citizens. Now let’s take a look at the natives:

Being a native in a country doesn’t make you smart, or resourceful, or a critical thinker… or even responsible. It just means that you feel entitled to be there. Immigrants, by and large, actually have to know how the system works and grok the abstractions of a new place from a more intellectual and analytical standpoint.

And so it is with digital natives and digital immigrants. Digital immigrants bring a lot of baggage with them, including maturity, experience analyzing media critically, abstracting complex arguments, and supporting their ideas with concrete evidence. These are exactly the same skills that the natives don’t have. Yet.

Grumpy Addendum

And these are the same skills that we call “21st Century Skills”… but which go back to the first art critic, sitting around the fire, arguing whether or not that painting on the cave wall really looks like a bison, or if it might be an antelope, and what was the artist thinking using that brown wash when clearly the horns are darker than that…