Digital immigrant (second generation)

I just read Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” and he said many things that resonated for me. I think his point that each generation is different from each other is self evident. He continues to say that previous incremental changes can’t be compared to the tremendously different world our last generation grew up in. He refers to this as a “singularity” and suggests the following about traditional teaching modes.

“But this is not just a joke. It’s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”

We had an internal training and someone who would self identify as a digital immigrant stated the following, “Why should we have to learn a entirely new way of teaching, why can’t the students today just figure it out?” My question is why should they when our publication models are changing, authority is changing, and information is increasingly becoming disseminated in ways I never dreamed of as an undergraduate in 1987?

Having grown up with the non-graphical internet (Gopher) and the card catalog I recognize that my understanding of information is very different from the students I teach. What I hope I can do it to help translate for the digital native why scholarship itself hasn’t changed but rather morphed from a finite, closed system to one where authorship is universal. My role as a library instructor is to help students understand how to locate needed information in both environments.

As Laura Cohen discussed in her post “Information Literacy in the Age of Social Scholarship” authority in its traditional context is changing to “authoritative bias.” She states, “We’re on the cusp of profound changes in the scholarly process. The evolving nature of publishing, scholarly conversation and peer review is rich fodder for our students. This makes the work of forward-thinking instruction librarians challenging, but not impossible.”