Prensky and Boyd

I found Prensky's ideas about young people as "digital natives" to be very interesting, but I believe many of his assumptions to be too broad. I see the value in distinguishing between those who were born into a time where technology was less pervasive in our society than those born more recently, but I think this creates a lot of incorrect assumptions about young people who have been exposed to technology their whole lives.

Boyd does an excellent job outlining some of these incorrect assumptions that Prensky makes, as well as highlighting the danger in those assumptions. At one point she notes that by assuming young people are digital natives, we are actually ensuring that they will become "digitally naive." That comment really resonated with me because that has been my experience working with youth using technology in the classroom. Just as Boyd describes in her text, my students often rely heavily on Google to complete classroom research, without critically engaging with whatever sites Google is generating for them. I also, as a science teacher, my students often ask me questions about wildly inaccurate statements about science (such as "I heard Bill Gates wants to get rid of the sun!") that they accept as fact because they read it on the internet.

When it comes to the question of whether or not young people are consumers or producers on the internet, I do feel that the majority are still consumers. At the middle school level, I notice the biggest generational difference between me and my students is that they use Youtube as their primary center of entertainment in the same way that I relied on television growing up. Anytime my students want to use the computer for personal reasons, they immediately go to Youtube, where they are consuming all types of videos and taking what the content creators have to say as fact.

I believe that students today do not know how to differentiate between what is fact and what is opinion or fabrication on the internet. My fear is that if students do not learn how to critically engage with and question what they find on the internet, then these individualized algorithms generated by Google and social media sites will be raising a generation that has many different definitions of "truth."