By Marc Prensky
From On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001)
© 2001 Marc Prensky
It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Today‟s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.
Today‟s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded (more…)
Archive for January, 2009
Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009Paying Our Debt to Posterity
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009By Dennis McCuistion
After a century of world economic leadership blemished primarily by government mistakes which created the Great Depression, the United States through its military power, essentially won the first and second World Wars and the Cold War. America’s leadership role was a beacon for dozens of countries that moved away from socialist/totalitarian systems and toward a more open and market system.
But among the positives, such as lower tax rates, we are now experiencing (more…)
