Are we really Digital Natives

Today’s readings made me really think about the way in which we receive information and the information age. I agree with a lot of the points made by Boyd and Wesch mainly about the way that we as educators need to help students process the way that they receive digital information.

The term Digital Native was popularized by Marc Prensky. I really enjoyed Boyd’s critique of the term Digital Native Boyd believes that the term digital native obscures the uneven distribution of technological skills and media literacy across youth populations "presenting an inaccurate portrait of young people as uniformly prepared for the digital era and ignoring the assumed level of privilege required to be native. Boyd believes that educators purport the inequity in technological education in this country, because those who are privileged tend to learn technological skills outside of the classroom. We must not assume that all students have innate media literacy; in a world that required media literacy to get well-paying jobs, access to health care educators must do their part to cultivate media and technological literacy


In Boyd’s piece he states, “Censorship of inaccurate or problematic content does not provide youth the skills they will one day need to evaluate information independently” this past statement really articulates some of the philosophical problems in the way that digital immigrants are educating digital natives. What Boyd is referring to is the new crisis of the information age in which we are not teaching students how to see the biases in digital information and to not look to question said information. Instead we are eliminating and preventing them from having access to that information. What are we teaching our children when we are teaching them the sources in which to receive their information instead of having them learn which sources their information should be coming from on their own.

In Michael Wesch’s piece what struck me the most was the following statement,
“We have had our why’s, how’s, and what’s upside-down, focusing too much on what should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why altogether. In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there”


I feel that this statement beautifully captures how the philosophy of education needs to change, especially the last fragment “let the what generate from there”. I feel that education should be in that order, and that we must teach students the importance of why they are learning things and what they learn is a produce of them learning how to be learners. I feel that we should be teaching our students to be the best learners that they can be because most of what they learn they are learning on their own in this age.