Revise the essay and give me comments on what to change.
Digital Natives
In Danah Boyd's novel, "it's complicated," Boyd talks about the prevailing topic regarding today's youth to be "digital natives." The growth of the Internet based activity has started to play such a large and impactful role in the lives of everyone who has access to the internet and the question that is brought up is how much does it affect each individual. Boyd has a negative tone on this issue and says that the digital era is affecting the youth in a harmful and detrimental way. This is because youth today have grown up being surrounded with an ample amount of advanced technology, way more advanced than any generation has seen in the past. Therefore the digital immigrants assume that the youth are a lot more equipped in the world of technology and the internet. There is also a disconnection between the students who are defined as the digital native and the teachers who are the digital immigrants.
Although Boyd dives into the negatives that occur through technology, there are many who differ from Boyd and highlight the internet's advantages like Clive Thompson. This topic relates to my life, because as a youth in the "digital native" era, the topic is very relevant throughout my daily life. A quote from Boyd's book that helps summarize her views of digital natives and that will be a guideline to my arguments is: "Two Massachusetts state government officials echoed this notion in 2010: "The children who attend school today are digital natives who think nothing of learning through the use of technology.
As adults, we are digital immigrants who remember lessons delivered through film strips and overhead projectors. In a state where digital flourished, the educational system should catch up to students." Many of today's teens are indeed deeply engaged with social media and are active participants in networked publics, but this does not mean that they inherently have the knowledge or skills to make the most of their online experiences." (Boyd 176). The main claim that Boyd addresses, that I will explore, is although today's youth are equipped with all the new advanced technology, they do not have the innate understanding of how to productively use these resources to their advantage and need to be taught these skills in order to fully activate their potential.
Digital Immigrants are the complete opposite of Digital Natives. Because Digital Immigrants did not grow up in the digital era, they prefer to communicate differently than Digital Natives. Digital Immigrants would rather talk on the phone or in person and send emails, while Digital Natives would rather send a text or use social media to interact. Also, Digital Immigrants were grown up reading books from front to back, while us Digital Natives would rather not waste that time and just google a sparknotes on the book that a teacher assigned to us. The last major difference between Digital Natives and Immigrants is that Digital Immigrants didn't have google or other search engines at their fingertips to find out information. They had to physically go the library and check out books or newspaper articles or magazines, when Digital Natives can just google anything and get the information in seconds. This makes it difficult for teachers to understand students thinking process and work habits and makes it unable for the students to learn at their max potential.
If you were born in the digital era and categorized as a "digital native" then there are many unintended consequences applied to you. There is so much uncertainty about the distribution of media literacy and technological skills throughout the digital native youth. This creates an inaccurate image of young people because so many of the digital immigrant population such as teachers and parents assume that if you were born in the digital era, you should be privileged to be native with technology. A bigger problem that makes the youth's image more inaccurate is when students don't have the capability of advancing their technology skills, there is more possibility of creating digital inequality because more privileged youth who do have the resources will be more native than those who don't. Therefore digital immigrants need to stop assuming that all of the youth in the digital era are digital native because there is a great amount of digital inequality from student to student.
I want to elaborate more on the last paragraph and throw in a video that I found on social media about the differences between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. A couple of days ago I was scrolling through my facebook feed, (not using technology productively), and saw a video titled, I JUST SUED THE SCHOOL SYSTEM!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqTTojTija8. The video talks about how "Nothing has changed" (1:25) in the schooling system and how students 150 years were taught the same way that we are taught now. He also brings up the point that students back then were taught to work in factories and mentions how nowadays so much has changed. Students need to be taught differently, because Digital Immigrants have a completely different thinking process than us and there's a good quote to help explain this, "One teacher standing in front of 20 kids each one having different strengths, different needs, different gifts, and different dreams and you teach the same thing the same way..
That's horrific."(2:43). In the school system whether it's middle school, high school, or college, students are required to take certain classes and this limits their ability to express their different strengths, needs, gifts and dreams. Even in college when you're allowed to select your major, you are still required to take certain classes that were taught the same curriculum many years ago. Another thing that happens way too often is even after you graduate you won't be working in the field of what your major intended to do so. This means that everything you learned went to just having a piece of paper saying that you graduated college and not to something where you could use everything you learned effectively. In order for students to be able to perform at their max ability, the school system needs to change because it is being taught the same way it was 150 years ago.
In Danah Boyd's book, a huge debate is brought up about the credibility of wikipedia. Boyd interviewed multiple students around the U.S. about the use of wikipedia in the school system. Most of the students reported that they are well aware that teachers considers wikipedia to have limited accuracy. I have experienced this as well a lot throughout school, and I was told by my teachers that anyone can edit wikipedia so I wasn't allowed to use it as a cite. This is a great example of the disconnection between digital natives and digital immigrants and not using technology productively.
Wikipedia can actually be a phenomenal educational tool, but few students and teachers know how to use it constructively. What most teachers don't know is that wikipedia actually has many ways of showing what is credible or not. Wikipedia allows you to look at the history of edits, who edits them, and where they got their information on certain parts of the text. They also include the ability to discuss and debate on whatever you're studying which allows you to see others perspective and knowledge. The disappointing thing is since teachers have such a negative stance towards wikipedia and looks for websites that are more "credible", that students don't effectively use everything accessible to them.
Although my argument may seem to be in favor of students using wikipedia, I understand why teachers don't want their students using the site. Boyd states, "Educators have an important role to play in helping youth navigate networked publics and the information-rich environments that the internet supports."(Boyd 180). This statement is very important because the youth indeed need to be media literate, and in order to do so they need to gain the skills by their educators to be able to navigate through the internet and gather the information they need. The biggest problem with this is they don't know how to correctly question information on websites such as wikipedia, but as mentioned before, students have the ability to use wikipedia but not yet have been taught to do so correctly. This is because the students teachers also have not been taught how to educate them how to navigate through the internet in the most productive way possible way.
Another issue about the networked aged is that there are many political implications. Boyd quotes, "I believe the digital natives rhetoric is worse than inaccurate; it is dangerous. Because of how society has politicized this language, it allows some to eschew responsibility for helping youth and adults navigate a networked world."(Boyd 197). Google has created their own algorithm that generates results that are personalized to due to your search query that includes demographic information, search history, and data obtained through social media. For example, if your browser history consists of viewing conservative websites, the results you get when you type in a question on google will align with those political views.
The video we watched in class further showed how the algorithm works showing how two people typed in a question in google and got completely different results. This ensues a non-neutral technological system. A problem within the school system that is related to this issue is many people believe that textbooks are neutral and have no bias. The reality is textbooks are actually highly political. Texas is notorious for this because they play a big role in shaping the textbooks throughout all of the U.S. Boyd uses a specific example of this and quotes, "So when educators in Texas insist on asserting that America's "founding fathers" were all Christian, it creates unease among historians who do not believe this to be accurate."(Boyd 189). The two main resources that students gain their information nowadays is through textbooks and google, and since both have proven to have political implications, they are accountable for eschewing responsibility for helping youth and adults navigate a networked world.
The educational system today has to dramatically change in order for students to be comfortable and learn. Marc Prensky's book does a great job analyzing this in his book Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants 2001. In the very beginning of the book he puts in a quote, "Our students have changed radically.
Today's students are no longer the people in our educational system was designed to teach... Our students are all "native speakers" of the digital language or video games and the internet... Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language, are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language"(Prensky 1-2). What Prensky is elaborating is that yes, students today have grown up in the age of "new technology", but most everything they learn from has come from video games and social media. This statement goes back to Danah Boyd's idea that although today's youth are equipped with all the new advanced technology, they are not using it productively. Since they have access to all this technology, students are spending more and more time in front of screens and aren't reading as much as they are supposed to. Because of this, student's thinking process differs incredibly from a Digital Immigrant.
School systems have the ability to change, and they need to capitalize on the new technology that is accessible to them. A study at the Pew Internet and American life Project found that 94% of students aging from twelve to seventeen use the internet for their schoolwork. With such a high number of students that use technology, why has the school system not changed that much in a span of 150 years? In The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap Between Internet-Savvy Students and their schools, 2002 a student quotes, "I think.. (school) would be a lot better of parents and older people would get more information about the internet, because, I mean... I don't blame them, because they didn't grow up with the Internet... I think that if there was a better understanding from parents and older people than I think education would skyrocket a lot."
This is such a true quote because right now, we are being taught by Digital Immigrants who grew up with basically no technology and learned everything from lectures and books. Although some teachers are pretty good with technology, I have experienced a good amount of teachers who barely understand how to use very easy things using technology for example displaying powerpoints or even trying to play a youtube video. Our current teachers and professors both grew up with little to no technology, so in order for them to increase their quality of teaching, they need to be able to understand technology better and create ways of using the technology that is accessible to them to help teach us and make us learn.
In Danah Boyd's novel, "it's complicated," Boyd conveys an argument about the growth of the internet and technology and the relationship it has to "digital natives." Boyd quotes, "We live in a technologically mediated world. Being comfortable using technology is increasingly important for everyday activities: obtaining a well-paying job, managing medical care, engaging with government.
Rather than assuming that youth have innate technical skills, parents, educators, and policymakers must collectively work to support those who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences... Familiarity with the latest gadgets or services is often less important than possessing the critical knowledge to engage productively with networked situations, including the ability to control how personal information flows and how to look for and interpret accessible information."(Boyd 180).
I was able to use other sources and my personal connections to further analyze Boyd's ideas and establish my thesis that although today's youth are equipped with all the new advanced technology, they do not have the innate understanding of how to productively use these resources to their advantage and need to be taught these skills in order to fully activate their potential.