After reading Prensky’s ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’ , I have the feeling that I was probably born in the wrong time or was ahead of my time in terms of school education. Like today’s digital natives, I always wondered during my school days that why can’t they make all the subjects and reading materials into something similar to a movie. I sincerely longed for a better visual illustration of the subject but always ended up with a somewhat intimidating fat book. That was the de-facto medium of instruction during those days and other sources like broadcasting or television didn’t have serious educational content. As a result, there was always someone to knock on my head and say “Stop day-dreaming and get back to study”. Well, in just a decade the dream has turned into reality. Before, learning or education was never supposed to be a fun and exciting exercise and it mostly came with serious pressure and tons of reading to excel in exams and to keep up with grades. I think digital natives are fortunate in that way because education have been presented to them in a refreshing manner where they get to use their common toys (digital tools) to gain knowledge, to complete classroom works and to pursue more serious projects. So when it comes to disciplined paperback classroom education, they naturally refrain from that environment since it is way out of their comfort zone.
We can’t hinder the growth which already happened in today’s generation but we should try to find a balance between the two where legacy form of education can co-mingle with the future education. Yes, it is not easy to make this happen in a day but everything takes time and change at this level is something similar to a revolution which will happen after much debate and deliberation. I think Monkey Wrench is a great example where we can see the clash between old school and new age geeks and how finally they invented something brilliant which is used popularly as a learning software. This shows that we need to accept and create new methodologies focused on digital natives and the transition is not going to be an easy one. So sooner we accept and adapt ourselves to the new ways, the more productive it will be for us and our future generations.
We can’t hinder the growth which already happened in today’s generation but we should try to find a balance between the two where legacy form of education can co-mingle with the future education. Yes, it is not easy to make this happen in a day but everything takes time and change at this level is something similar to a revolution which will happen after much debate and deliberation. I think Monkey Wrench is a great example where we can see the clash between old school and new age geeks and how finally they invented something brilliant which is used popularly as a learning software. This shows that we need to accept and create new methodologies focused on digital natives and the transition is not going to be an easy one. So sooner we accept and adapt ourselves to the new ways, the more productive it will be for us and our future generations.
No comments:
Post a Comment