Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

This is a quick Boxing Day reaction to Russel Stannard’s recent AudioBoo (a cool little stream-of-consciousness-friendly platform) post here about the importance of the distinction between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants being perhaps overblown in the context of EFL.

Russel makes the valid points that (1) the distinction is of limited value because there is not much learners or teachers can do about it; i.e. if you are a Digital Immigrant you can never become a Digital Native; and vice-versa; and (2) there are plenty of Digital Immigrants who are wonderfully tech-savvy; and quite a few Digital Natives who are quite comfortable using Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare but are clueless when it comes to trouble-shooting html code on a web page or other deep-tech endeavors. The main rebuttal point I’d like to make here, in the nicest possible way as I have huge respect for Russel and his work, is that the important difference between these two “tribes” is not in their respective attitude towards technology, but in their contrasting frames of reference.

As I mentioned in my recent talk at TESOL France, we are now in a (transitory) situation where the EFL teaching industry is populated almost exclusively by Digital Immigrants (teachers, school administrators and teaching resource publishers, etc) who largely cater to EFL learners in the Digital Native camp (all those aged 25 and younger, at any rate). The former has a frame of reference — through their own life and teaching experiences, mandated curricula or simply what currently makes money for them — which is largely “atom-based,” as 1990′s MIT digital guru Nicholas Negroponte used to say. That means classrooms, textbooks, workbooks, dictionaries, and black-or-whiteboards (whether interactive or not); and their companion “software” and evaluation systems: courses, achievement levels and frameworks, and graded texts and video specifically produced for the purpose of language learning.

All Digital Natives have ever known, on the other hand, is a bit-driven universe where all of these items and concepts are rapidly disappearing from what they consider “their” world; existing instead in a fading “parents’ world” that they know is destined to become largely irrelevant to them by the time they reach adulthood (the latest addition to the “obsolete technologies” list for this group: e-mail.) I’d like to emphasize here that it’s not just about materials: it’s about the way this generation explores, absorbs, shares, socializes, plays, values experiences and draws conclusions as to what is useful and what is not. It is a way of thinking that a Digital Immigrants simply cannot imprint upon themselves, no matter how earnest their adoption of “new technology” (a phrase that by its very utterance automatically places its speaker in the fuddy-duddy camp).

To oversimplify, the educational establishment and the industries that revolve around it have yet to shift from fundamentally 19th and 20th century instruction-based methods to 21st century approaches based on learn-by-doing / learning socially / learning-through-exposure. Unless this shift happens, this establishment — the textbook publishers; the teachers’ associations; the test developers; the language institute franchises; the purveyors of “e-learning solutions” — risks guaranteeing its own long-term marginalization and decline. Shorter-term, my point is that unless we recognize the disconnect in frameworks between these two groups, and take measures to more fully blend the best of current digital and web-based services and resources with the best of EFL pedagogy (and, parallel with this, start to abandon legacy EFL resource materials and methods) we miss out on helping Digital Native learners fullly attain their considerable language-learning potential.

The good news is that the kids are not waiting for the grown-ups to catch up: they are surfing, playing games, watching YouTube videos, looking up music lyrics, Twittering, and making friends on Facebook, all in English, and 99% on their own initiative, outside of the educational loop. They make mistakes, they may be picking up bad habits, they may “plateau” at some point, but they are finally doing what we have spent decades exhorting them to do: communicating in English. And they are doing it, by and large, without us. At this point, the EFL educational “establishment” has to make the same decision that all one-time industry leaders need to make when unforseen ideas and events overwhelm traditional ways of thinking and of doing things. The world has changed; how do I deal with that change? Do I lead, follow, or get out of the way?