In Marc Parensky’s two part essay “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”(2001) he examines the problem with today’s educational system. He believes that the way students think today is different from the way their predecessors thought and today’s educational system is not set up correctly for teaching them.

Parensky believes the arrival of digital technology is the reason for this change. Today’s students spend more time using computers, cell phones, video games, and other electronic devices than they do reading. As a result of this he states, “today’s students think and process information fundamentally different from their predecessors.” Thus their “brains and thinking patterns have physically changed.”
Prensky calls these new types of technological savvy students “Digital Natives”. They were born into this digital era and technology is their native language. They have developed hypertext minds and their thought processes are more parallel than sequential.

Most of the digital natives’ teachers were born before this era and speak a different outdated language therefore Prensky has dubbed them “Digital Immigrants.” Digital Immigrants were taught to learn in a linear manner and therefore teach in the same way. This can impede and slow down the learning process of digital natives.

According to Parensky, digital natives are acclimated to receiving information quickly, multi-task, thrive on instant gratification, and prefer games to “serious” work. This is not how the Digital Immigrants learned and many of these concepts seem foreign to them. These two vastly different ways of learning are causing the problems within today’s educational system.

These issues need to be confronted and new ways or methods of teaching need to be figured out. Going faster with more random access and less step by step and more in parallel are some improvements Parensky suggests making to the methodology of teaching digital natives. He also believes in two forms of content: “legacy” and “future”.

“Legacy “content is what the Digital Immigrants are comfortable with. It is the traditional curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, and logical thinking, etc.

“Future” content is more digital and technological. It also includes the ethics, politics, sociology, and languages that go with the digital content. Digital natives are interested in future content bit the digital immigrants are not equipped to teach it.

By introducing video game based learning to the classroom Parensky believes that both legacy and future content can be taught in today’s classrooms. This is a medium they are familiar with and enjoy. The key is to design the games well and engage the student. They must be real games combined with real content.
Parensky backs up this belief by stating the success of The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy, a computer aided software program for engineers that teaches them new concepts in a “first person shooter” style of video games. Creating this game was difficult and time consuming for the Digital Immigrants but because of its success they applied more of the Digital Native methodology to their future lessons.

The results from The Lightspan Partnership, which created PlayStation games for curricular reinforcement, were also highly successful. Students who used their games increased their vocabulary by 25% and the math problem solving and procedure scores 51% and 30% higher than those who didn’t use them.

90 percent of the children who used Scientific Learning’s Fast Forward game-based program for retraining kids with reading problems achieved significant gains in one or more tested areas.

According to Parensky, by designing attention-grabbing games students will play them and therefore practice what they learn. Practice = time spent learning and it works.

Parensky believes it that the education of Digital Natives is contingent on us. Do we keep teaching the same traditional manner even though it is not as effective and pretend the issue of Digital Native/Digital Immigrant doesn’t exist? Or do we learn the new language and integrated with the old?

Marc Parensky is an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw Hill, 2001.) He is founder and CEO of Games2train, a game based- learning company; founder of The Digital Multiplier, an organization dedicated to eliminate digital divide in learning worldwide; and creator of the site www.SocialImpactGames.com. Marc holds an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in teaching from Yale. More of his writings can be found atwww.marcparensky.com/writing/default.asp.