Peter Griffin: Digital immigrants have a lot to learn - and teach

I was having lunch with a group of middle-aged businessmen last week when I heard the terms "digital immigrants" and "digital natives" for the first time.

They're technology catchphrases, so I should have heard of them before. The first is used to describe people who may surround themselves with technology but didn't grow up with it. The other is a term for those who are living and breathing the internet and digital content from an early age.

The two groups apparently think completely differently and Mark Prensky, the "visionary, futurist and learning designer" who came up with the terms, reckons the education sector is in serious trouble if it doesn't adapt its teaching techniques to suit these digitally-wired young minds.

"We need to help all our students take advantage of these new tools and systems to educate themselves. I know this is especially hard when we're the ones floundering," Prensky says of teachers.

He has a point, one illustrated well by media baron Rupert Murdoch in a speech to US newspaper editors last year:

"I'm a digital immigrant," Murdoch proclaimed. "I grew up in a highly centralised world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives. They'll never know a world without ubiquitous broadband internet access."

The digital immigrants Murdoch spoke of are instantly recognisable. Obviously, they're over 30, but it's their behaviour that gives away their newly arrived status in the digital world.

When they see me using my smart phone to download email in the pub, they snatch the device off me, pass it around and laugh at how big it is.

They'd rather print out a letter and make changes to it on paper with a pen than edit the document on the screen, which is my preferred method.

They're less adept at staying safe on the internet and are more likely to have their bank accounts cleaned out in "phishing" scams, like Upper Hutt couple Joanne Kinnaird and her husband Rob recently did.

"We're all lulled into a false sense of security when there's no security. They should bring back passbooks or I'll be sticking to the mattress under the bed," Kinnaird told the Dominion Post.

And digital immigrants are responsible for half the "faulty" electronics returned to stores in the United States. They actually work - but their new owners just can't operate them.

Or maybe it's that digital natives are designing our gadgets to the geeky logic of their own minds, and not for the majority of people who are in fact digital immigrants.

The natives are just as easy to pick. They're all young. you will find them hogging the nearest Xbox console or downloading music on the home computer while instant messaging their friends or playing Counter Strike online. They're growing up with newsgroups, blogs, wikis, instant messaging and online social networks.

They do everything fast and consume massive amounts of TV. Prensky estimates that by the time a digital native graduates from college, they will have spent close to 10,000 hours playing video games, sent more than 200,000 emails and instant messages, spent 10,000 hours using their mobile phones, and watched more than 20,000 hours of TV. In contrast, they will have clocked up only 5000 hours reading books.

I'm somewhere in the middle, a digital go-between. I use a lot of technology and I'm a bit of a geek. But like Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984, I have fond memories of the time before the revolution, when life was a lot simpler. I still prefer a good book made of paper over anything digital.

I had a teacher at school who wasn't even a digital immigrant, he was a digital outcast. He taught history and produced the same yellowing pages of notes on the Maori Wars or the 1916 Irish uprising to each new class every year. We had computers at our disposal, but he never set us tasks on them. Instead he filled the board with neat lines of chalk-written notes that we had to furiously write down before he wiped the board clean and started again.

I'd have preferred a printout of the notes, like some teachers gave, or even a PowerPoint presentation, but he was still the best damn teacher I ever had and the one I learnt the most from.

Prensky's right, we think differently depending on our familiarity with technology, and teachers long in the profession need to be aware of this. Young minds used to jump-cuts and the rapid scroll of an instant messaging conversation get bored easily. But in their ignorance of new technology those old pros have an advantage. They know the value of decent content over delivery mechanisms. They know what came before, and they know what sticks in kids' minds. That wisdom should always be cherished.