After the recent Leading a Digital School conference in QLD, where Marc Prensky was the keynote speaker, I got this email from him… (his comments were based on a couple of tweets I made during his presentation, one about the fact that while the information was ok, I felt that the message was about 10 years old)

Marc wrote…

From: Marc [prensky@attglobal.net]
Sent: Thursday, 10 September 2009 11:45 AM
To: Chris.Betcher
Subject: Follow-up

Hi Chris.
Good meeting you at IWB.
Since, judging from your tweets, you were clearly not happy with my presentation, I’d be very interested in hearing what you would have told the audience.
Perhaps you are so far ahead, that you are always looking for something new and different. There is plenty, but much of the old stuff hasn’t gotten through yet, and it is more fundamental than the current bleeding edge.
Whatever the case, I welcome your thoughts. Please give my regards to the people at PLC.
Best,
Marc

My reply to Prensky was as follows…

Hi Marc,
Thanks for taking the time to write. I’m not sure that saying “I’m clearly not happy with your presentation” is really an accurate summation of the tweetstream. I don’t think the tweets I made weren’t overly negative or critical of your presentation although obviously I did think that the message was getting a little dated for this particular crowd. The actual content was fine, I have no issue with the basic message your were giving, I just thought it wasn’t particularly challenging… your basic message as I understood it was that, a) schools need to change and change can be scary, and b) kids today are a bit different from the generations before them. For this particular audience I just would have thought these two assumptions would be a given… On a positive note, I did rather like your nouns/verbs metaphor, and found that quite a helpful distinction for teachers grappling with this stuff.
I’m hardly going to tell you what you should present… I’m sure you can make that judgment for yourself. I do think that your presentation made a number of sweeping generalizations that didn’t always hold up to scrutiny, and I was a little surprised you were still milking the old immigrants/natives argument quite so much… I guess I see that as a fairly flawed metaphor for a whole lot of reasons, and I don’t really think that such polarised thinking is a good thing. Working with kids every day I see so many exceptions to the “rule”, in both directions. I actually blogged about it a while back at http://betch.edublogs.org/2009/01/06/the-myth-of-the-digital-native/ if you’re interested.
I also did leave a short AudioBoo at the end of Day 1, which you can check out at http://audioboo.fm/boos/60209-iwbnet09-leading-a-digital-school. I just re-listened to what I said at the time, and I think perhaps you’re being a little sensitive… I don’t think it makes me out to have a negative view of your presentation, or to indicate that I wasn’t happy with it, but rather just that I didn’t feel challenged by it. Perhaps it’s just your reputation as a “thought leader” in this space that made me expect to hear something different. Either way, it was fine. Don’t worry about it.
Anyway, it was good to meet you. I would have enjoyed the chance to have a bit more of a personal chat with you at the BBQ but I guess you were busy. I think I would have enjoyed the opportunity to really dig into some of your ideas and explore them a bit further.
I’ll pass on your regards to Bill.
Chris

Sounds like he was a bit miffed at people (including me) not thinking his presentation was as good as he thought it was. I would have enjoyed the chance to chat more with him about this stuff, in fact, at the welcome BBQ I invited him to join myself and a group of other educators for a social chat but he declined. I have also not heard back from him in response to the email above, so I guess he’s not interested in having a discussion about it. Seems to me if you want to make sweeping statements that are demonstrably wrong on so many levels them you ought to be willing to engage in conversation about it.

But apparently not.

At the conference a few weeks ago, Prensky got a group of about 10 kids up on stage to interview them about their engagement with technology. I’m not sure exactly what this was supposed to prove… there was one student (a boy, predictably) who was a bit of a geek, totally into games and the web; there was a couple of female students who were very nonplussed about technology, one of them even said they really didn’t like using computers at all; the remaining kids were at varying stages of interest/engagement with tech, most gave examples of using it regularly for games, chat, IM, etc, but none seems to me to have any really deep connection to it.

If the point of the student forum was to make the point that kids have an innate “digital nativeness”, then I don’t think this example hit the mark. I’m sure the kids that were chosen to be part of this panel were selected based on their level of computer use and knowledge, but they certainly didn’t fit the pattern of “natives”.

And I’ll say it again like I said in the post, the danger in believing that kids DO have this nativeness is that school build all sorts of other beliefs around it. If you think a group of people is already innately good at something, you won’t spend as much time or energy actively teaching those skills… you just assume they can already do it, and the fact is that many of them can’t.

Thanks for the considered comment. I’m not sure what part of the post you disagree with… most of the examples you used seem to be on the same wavelength as my thinking. You seem to agree with me that our students lack tech skills, that they often lack initiative to get started (in any deeper kind of way) and that kids often learn by seeing good examples set for them by older, hopefully wiser, adults. I think we are on the same page here!

The point is that kids, by and large, don’t have some innate “nativeness” that helps them be masters of technology. Being at ease with technology is not the same thing as being good with it, and not all kids are goods with it. Some are, and some aren’t, but I’m more convinced than ever that the “some kids” who are good at technology, who pick it up quickly and easily and are comfortable exploring it, are not like that because of their age but rather because of a personality type. People (not just kids) who have this personality type that values exploration, curiosity and wonder are likely to be the real tech-tinkerers. Conversely, people who aren’t are not. And I’m certain that this has nothing to do with age.

Sounds like you lead your students well in regard to their engagement with technology… sadly, many teachers do not.

I set a task recently for my year 11 students to select a piece of software that they have never seen before (I gave them a suggested list of open source and web 2 applications in case they couldn’t think of anything themselves) and to create a training manual (either as a written document or a series of screencasts) for it. Their choices of software, despite being completely open ended, were all taken from the list I supplied, and the depth of exploration was relatively superficial. This despite the fact that they said they enjoyed doing the task, and that they said they learned a lot from it. I really have doubts that our “natives” are good at taking things deep without prodding from the teacher… and if the teacher doesn’t know much about this stuff then the chances are the kids will fail to really push their thinking.

Anyway, thanks for the comment… I’m glad you took the time to write it.

Chris

Yes, many of our older students lack essential tech skills. But, what do you expect them to be able to do if all they have previously engaged in is FB or chat? We know that parents are role models. Parents who read are encouraging their children to read. How many parents are actively tinkering with technology and actively showing their kids how they are learning to use it? I know I do and all my kids are digitally wise

I spend most of my time as an educator de-programming students who have been taught to essentially ‘wait’ for the teacher. It is hard to change the kids mindset but given time, many students can learn to be self directed learners. My message is simple no one can know it all and no one has ever trained me to use any of the software or tech tools that I use. I trained me – so you can train you!

I frequently use new software with the students and we learn to use it together. Reading the instructions, following a tutorial, searching through forums and looking for tutorials on You Tube are useful strategies that get results. The teacher must try to do whatever task that is set for the students – actively demonstrating the problem solving strategies that they are using to achieve the goal. Teachers can’t step back and expect it to ‘just happen’.

Like I am always saying to everyone at school ‘It’s a computer – not a magic wand’.