Digital education

“On or about December 1910, human character changed,” the British writer Virginia Woolf famously wrote in 1924. Were she living today, she would agree with Marc Prensky who said in 2001 that, on or about 1985, the world changed.

While Woolf was talking about how writers view life, however, Prensky was talking about how life itself has changed. On or about 1985, children were born into a world with Internet. These children (now no older than in their late twenties) cannot live without the Web.

Prensky distinguished between two types of human beings – digital natives and digital immigrants. Digital natives do not need to learn how to use the Internet; the Web is in their bones. Digital immigrants, on the other hand, have to take time to find out what to do with a computer.

If we may use a simplistic example, if you give a digital native a mobile phone, s/he will be downloading apps in less than five minutes. If you give a digital immigrant the same mobile phone, s/he will probably be entering phone numbers and texting friends after taking a long time to figure out how the phone works.

There are many other simplistic ways to distinguish the two types of human beings. Digital natives share images instantaneously; digital immigrants email. Digital natives ask Siri to get them a pizza; digital immigrants go to a restaurant to eat a pizza. Digital natives who drive cars change routes according to Waze; digital immigrants curse the traffic. Digital natives who do not have cars call Uber or Grab Taxi; digital immigrants stand on the street to hail a cab.

These are stereotypes, but the basic truth is undeniable: there is a digital divide between the generations born before and after 1985.

There is another classification coined after Prensky – digital aliens. As Ira Kaufman explained it in 2011, digital natives (also known as Millennials, Net Generation, Gen Y) are 10 to 29 years old, digital immigrants are 30 to 60 years old, and digital aliens are 45 to 70 years old. Digital immigrants at least use social media, but digital aliens are stuck in email, texting, and surfing, if at all.

Prensky (as well as several others after him) outlined the crucial problem with modern education due to the digital revolution. In the USA and other technologically advanced countries, digital immigrants are teaching digital natives. In the Philippines (where most educators are not even on Facebook), digital aliens are teaching digital natives.

Why is this important to us? Because the K to 12 curriculum, as well as the new General Education Curriculum, assumes that students are digital natives and that teachers should not be digital aliens but digital immigrants.

Think of those in Kindergarten today; they were all born in the 21st century. Think of those in college today; they were all born after 1985. Now, think of all the teachers you know; except for those that finished their undergraduate education in 2005 or later, they are digital immigrants at the very least and most likely even digital aliens.

Let us take another simplistic example. A non-digital teacher asks students Who What Where and When questions. All of her or his students key in a word or phrase into their mobile phones and the answers are there. In other words, any question that needs only information can be answered through the Web. How many of the questions actually asked in classrooms are merely Who What Where and When questions (technically called “Remembering” questions in a taxonomy or classification named after Benjamin Bloom)? (Bloom’s Taxonomy has the following stages: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating.)

There have been studies of the type of questions Filipino teachers ask in our classrooms. Maria Lourdes S. Bautista, for example, in her book “Teacher Talk and Student Talk” (1994) discovered that Filipino teachers rarely go beyond the Remembering stage.

Digital natives do not need to be taught how to answer Remembering questions, because the Web remembers for them. Sadly, many teachers remain digital immigrants or aliens even when they move up the taxonomic ladder to Understanding. The Web does not have only answers to factual questions; it also holds a lot of answers to Understanding. Whole term papers, for example, could be and have been written just cutting and pasting from various Websites. Even Facebook, despite the predominance of photos of food and landscapes, sometimes hosts profound discussions on the Understanding level.

In fact, Applying, Analyzing, and Evaluating can be done by digital natives quite easily using the Web, which has a number of professors from the world’s top universities sharing their lessons, books, articles, and ideas with the public. Students still need teachers to guide them on which sites are most useful and which sites merely distract them from what is truly essential, but by and large, students today can navigate the Web rationally and with maturity.

What, then, is the role of the Filipino teacher in a classroom – real or virtual – when students can learn by themselves? The role is in the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy – Creating. This is clear from the K to 12 curriculum. (To be continued)