Students born roughly between 1980 and 1994 were saddled with the moniker “digital natives” by Marc Prensky. There are other descriptions of this generation as collaborative, optimistic, multitaskers, team-oriented achievers and talented with technology.
The Digital Native Debate has two claims: Digital natives exist and education must change to meet their needs. This unique group, according to the proponents of the digital native theory are not getting their needs met by the current educational system. Prensky says, “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”
Watch this You Tube promoted on Prensky’s You Tube Channel:
The second assumption is that digital natives “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors” Multi-tasking is given as an example. While students can listen to music, text, watch television and do homework is not a proof of higher intelligence. In fact, multi-tasking and multi-processing may result in concentration loss and overload according to Rubinstein as reported in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: “Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching.”
Lisa Moser Russell 