José's+Essay

The use of the new technologies for the development of collaborative learning enviroments has been a subject of important discussions by both linguists, psychologists and theorists of education. This essay intends to raise a debate on whether teachers and educators really know how to effectively use these tools. I will start from the concept of "Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants" (PRENSKY, 2001) and after that I will discuss the problems with the educational tools developed by digital immigrants for the digital native generations, such as webquests (rephrase and include idea about "accent"). This is an argumentative essay; I do not intend to provide objective evidence of my position; I will only present and problematize the views of authors who discuss the use of the new technologies in the classroom. I believe that the development of virtual learning environments by digital immigrants leads to clumsy tools that can't actually raise the interest of the digital native students, and will try to prove this point.

The concept of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants was proposed by Marc Prensky in 2001, and consists today in one of the most important theoretical tools to discuss education in the digital era. Upon realizing that the North American education was not necessarily on a "decline", but the students that had changed, Prensky proposed a then new way of approaching this issue. Prensky showed that youngsters of the 2000's are the first generation to grow up in a deeply technological environment. He states that this generation "speaks" the "language" of the digital world as "native speakers" - in other words, they relate to these technologies as a permanent part of their lives, such as their mother language. The generation of the teachers, however, had to actually learn how to deal with technology; they "speak" that digital language with an "accent". Prensky describes them as "digital immigrants". He says: "It's very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language" (PRENSKY, 2001) The author then concludes that digital immigrants must learn how to "speak" the digital language and be able to teach in its environments.

Following Prensky's theories, several educators started developing digital environments for teaching. What I believe is that these tools, which were developed by digital immigrants, do not actually appeal to the digital native students. To give just one example, I would like to discuss the use of Webquests as learning environments. The tool, developed by Bernie Dodge in the mid 1990's, consists of "an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web.", according to the website webquest.org. Although encouraging students to use the web on their researches might look like a good idea, webquests evidence, in my opinion, how a strong digital immigrant "accent" can ruin the student's learning experience. PARAGRAPH Through the analysis of a few examples that can be found on the website questgarden.com, it is possible to witness how little the digital immigrants know about their students: the webquests have terrible layouts, with poor color schemes, lame page distribution and badly chosen images. This is the direct result from a digital immigrant teacher trying to develop a digital learning environment. Our students, today, spend the whole day on Facebook - which has a very beautiful layout -, download music and movies from websites that actually care about browsing quality, play Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) with expansive and immersive gameplay and so on. They will not be impressed by merely doing on the computer what they would do in a library either way. The digital natives are difficult to impress, and by "speaking" their language with such a strong "accent", teachers not only embarass themselves but also are unable to raise the student's interest.

I believe that the solution is a new way to work with the digital environment. Since teachers usually don't really dominate the digital language, I believe that schools should hire at least one computer programmer to work on this issue. Schools usually have only a computer lab technician, responsible for fixing computers and maintaning the network; I believe that this is not enough. Teachers should be able to work alongside a programmer in order to develop learning environments suited for the needs of their students. This would create learning environments closer to the reality of the digital natives. I believe that teaching today has to take a turn. Teachers must rethink what it means to teach. We have to resignify spaces such as the "school", the "classroom" and the "library". We are teaching a generation that lives a multifunctional life; they are used to doing ten things at the same time and still manage to focus. Simply putting them in front of a computer won't make them like the class; we need to actually speak to them in their language. Why not allow them to use their Facebook during class? Why not teach them through World of Warcraft? If we keep asking students to use the internet as the digital immigrants do, we won't catch their attention.

REFERENCES: www.webquests.com www.questgarden.com PRENSKY, Marc //Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants// in //On the Horizon vol. 9, no. 5, October 2001//, MCB University PRess