Blog Post #4

Prensky, Marc. “H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom.” Innovate: Journal of Online Education 5.3 (2009): n. pag. Web. 5 June 2012.

Prensky is the originator of the term “digital natives,” which has gained widespread (albeit not unconditional) acceptance since he coined it in 2001. I decided to see what Prensky had written more recently.

In this article, Prensky suggests that the distinction between digital natives (those who have grown up with digital technology) and digital immigrants (those who have not) will become less relevant as time goes on, presumably because the digital immigrants will die off, or at least become less influential. He advocates an increased emphasis on the development of “digital wisdom,” which he defines as “a twofold concept referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities.” By the first statement, he means making wise choices aided by technology—accessing health systems to improve patient care, for example. In the second statement, Prensky is referring to critical technology use, which he does not explore in the same detail as the first point. This is probably because the bulk of the article does not itself exhibit this second quality of digital wisdom, but consists of a list of the ways in which digital technology will improve our lives, such as “enhancing our ability to conduct deeper analyses.” Prensky writes that “digital technology is making us smarter.” He does not qualify this sentiment; while he does write that “every [technological] enhancement comes with a trade-off,” he doesn’t characterize any negative components of these trade-offs as meaningful, but as necessary sacrifices in service of positive progress. “The unenhanced brain,” Prensky writes, “is well on its way to becoming insufficient for truly wise decision making.”

I am no Luddite, but I found this article somewhat chilling in its unconditional boosterism of technology. Similarly to his famous “digital natives” article, Prensky cites very few academically valid sources, and those he does cite are only examined in the most superficial way. Ironically, according to his reference page Prensky has accessed the majority of his sources digitally; yet rather than exemplifying digital wisdom, his article embodies its opposite.

I would not recommend this article to my peers. However, Prensky raises a few points that are useful in planning how one might teach writing in a digital space. He writes that “as we offer more courses in digital literacy, we should also offer students guidance in developing digital wisdom [...] by letting students learn by using new technologies, [with teachers] putting themselves in the role of guides, context providers, and quality controllers.” This is excellent advice, and would serve students much better than the arbitrary limits some writing teachers impose on their students’ technology use. Teaching students critical technology use requires that we teachers approach technology with an open mind ourselves and move away from overly simplistic guidelines such as minimum numbers of non-electronic sources in a paper or word-processing being the only acceptable classroom technology. We need to exhibit digital wisdom ourselves so we can teach it to our students.