Teaching For The New Millenium by Marc Prensky

Teaching for the New Millenium
By Marc Prensky
Edited by: Universidad Camilo Jos Cela Printer: Albatros, S.L. Legal Deposit: M-27788-2011

Index
Index
Introduction Listen to the Natives Young minds, fast times Turning on the lights Backup education? Programming is the new Literacy Five essential meta-skills Why YouTube matters Recommended readings 5 7 15 21 27 29 35 37 47
Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker, writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital GameBased Learning (McGraw Hill, 2001), Dont Bother Me, Mom, Im Learning (Paragon House, 2006), and the upcoming Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for REAL Learning (Corwin 2010). Marc is the founder and CEO of Games2train, a gamebased learning company whose clients include IBM, Bank of America, Pfizer, the U.S. Department of Defense and the L.A. and Florida Virtual Schools. He is also the creator of the site www.SocialImpactGames.com. Marc holds an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in Teaching from Yale. More of his writings can be found at www.marcprensky.com/writing. Marc can be contacted at [email protected] .

Introduction
Introduction
The articles and essays in this collection, all written by me in the first decade of the 21st century, contain a number of common, and important messages for 21st century educators and employers:
The students of the 21st century,who will all be our workers of tomorrow, need different things from their education than the students of the past. Today, we do not offer them these things, even though it is clear what many of them are. What we do offer our 21st century students and workers of tomorrow in their schools today is almost entirely an education of yesterday. While some of this education is still important, a great deal of it is not. The world is changing at a pace where this old education is fast becoming less and less useful to our young people, and to our future employers as well. The part that is still important is handicapped by continuing to be taught in a way that, for our 21st century students, is outmoded and no longer works well, telling and testing. As a result, the students of today (i.e. the workers of tomorrow) who are excited to be part of the 21st century, are bored to tears in their schools. The energy and interest of todays young people is focused mainly on their own passions, and on their growing outside-of-school capabilities. Educators and employers rarely, if ever, ask them about these things, so we do not know. And if they try to tell us, we refuse to listen, treating their opinions much as, 100 years ago, we treated the opinions of a different half of the world, women. The only education that will work for the future is an education that will help students show reverence for the past, but not live in it. Todays students, and future workers, feel trapped in a world where the future is changing, but the preparation provided for that future is not. There are a number of things we can, and should do right now if we want to improve this situation, and create more engaged and successful students and workers for the future. They include: systematically teaching all students key tools like problem-solving from the earliest grades, focusing on students own passions as a bridge to their learning and motivation, deleting material and skills from the past that are no longer relevant or necessary, and replacing what is deleted with important future skills such as programming, video production and communication, and working successfully in online communities. I hope you enjoy these essays, and that they lead you to my books, particularly Teaching Digital NativesPartnering for Real Learning (about how to teach todays students), and my forthcoming book (about what to teach todays students.) My goal in all of my writing is to provide new ideas and perspectives; so that readers may be better equipped to help todays and tomorrows young people succeed at school, work and life. Marc Prensky New York City, May 2011
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Listen to the Natives

Schools are stuck in the 20th century. Students have rushed into the 21st. How can schools catch up and provide students with a relevant education?
Published in In Educational Leadership magazine, Learning in the Digital Age, December 2005/January 2006 | Volume 63 | Number 4 | Pages 8-13. 2005 Marc Prensky
School didnt teach me to read. I learned from my games. A student
Educators have slid into the 21st century and into the digital age still doing a great many things the old way. Its time for education leaders to raise their heads above the daily grind and observe the new landscape thats emerging. Recognizing and analyzing its characteristics will help define the education leadership with which we should be providing our students, both now and in the coming decades. Times have changed. So too, have the students, the tools, and the requisite skills and knowledge. Lets take a look at some of the features of our 21st century landscape that will be of utmost importance to those entrusted with the stewardship of our childrens 21st century education.
Digital Natives
Our students are no longer little versions of us, as they may have been in the past. In fact, they are so different from us that we can no longer use either our 20th century knowledge or our training as a guide to what is best for them educationally. Ive coined the term digital native to refer to todays students (2001). They are native speakers of technology, fluent in the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet. I refer to those of us who were not born into the digital world as digital immigrants. We have adopted many aspects of the technology, but just like those who learn another language later in life, we retain an accent because we still have one foot in the past. We will read a manual, for example, to understand a program before we think to let the program teach itself. Our accent from the pre-digital world often makes it difficult for us to effectively communicate with our students. Our students, as digital natives, will continue to evolve and change so rapidly that we wont be able to keep up. This phenomenon renders traditional catch-up methods, such as in-service training, essentially useless. We need more radical solutions. For example, students could learn algebra far more quickly and effectively if instruction were available in game format. Students would need to beat the game to pass the course. They would be invested and engaged in the process. We also need to select our teachers for their empathy and guidance abilities rather than exclusively for their subject-matter knowledge. We all remember best those teachers who cared about us as individuals and who cut us some slack when necessary. In todays rush to find teachers qualified in the curriculum, we rarely make empathy a priority.
Shifting Gears
As educators, we must take our cues from our students 21st century innovations and behaviors, abandoning, in many cases, our own pre-digital instincts and comfort zones. Teachers must practice putting engagement before content when teaching.
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They need to laugh at their own digital immigrant accents, pay attention to how their students learn, and value and honor what their students know. They must remember that they are teaching in the 21st century. This means encouraging decision making among students, involving students in designing instruction, and getting input from students about how they would teach. Teachers neednt master all the new technologies. They should continue doing what they do best: leading discussion in the classroom. But they must find ways to incorporate into those discussions the information and knowledge that their students acquire outside class in their digital lives. Our young people generally have a much better idea of what the future is bringing than we do. Theyre already busy adopting new systems for communicating (instant messaging), sharing (blogs), buying and selling (eBay), exchanging (peer-to-peer technology), creating (Flash), meeting (3D worlds), collecting (downloads), coordinating (wikis), evaluating (reputation systems), searching (Google), analyzing (SETI), reporting (camera phones), programming (modding), socializing (chat rooms), and even learning (Web surfing, Wikipedia, YouTube). 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 were the ones floundering, but teachers can certainly ask students, Does anyone do anything on the Web that is relevant to what were discussing? or Can you think of any examples of this problem in your computer games? Teachers can also help students figure out who has the best access to technology outside school and encourage students to form study groups so that more students benefit from this access. Teachers can learn what technological equipment they need in their classrooms simply by asking students, and they can lobby to get these items installed in school computer labs and libraries.
Student Engagement
More and more of our students lack the true prerequisites for learning: engagement and motivation. At least in terms of what we offer them in our schools. Our kids do know what engagement is: outside school, they are fully engaged by their 21st century digital lives. If educators want to have relevance in this century, it is crucial that we find ways to engage students in school. Because common sense tells us that we will never have enough truly great teachers to engage these students in the old waysthrough compelling lectures from those rare, charismatic teachers, for examplewe must engage them in the 21st century way: electronically. Not through expensive graphics or multimedia, but through what the kids call gameplay. We need to incorporate into our classrooms the same combination of desirable goals, interesting choices, immediate and useful and opportunities to level up (that is, to see yourself improve) that engage kids in their favorite complex computer games. One elementary school in Colorado, for example, takes its students on a virtual journey to a distant planet in a spaceship powered by knowledge. If the students dont have enough knowledge to move the ship, they need to find it, in one another.
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Collaborating with Students

As 21st century educators, we can no longer decide for our students; we must decide with them, as strange as that may feel to many of us. We need to include our students in everything we do in the classroom, involving them in discussions about curriculum development, teaching methods, school organization, discipline, and assignments. Faculty or administration meetings can no longer be effective without student representation in equal numbers. Our brightest students, trusted with responsibility, will surprise us all with their contributions. This may sound like the inmates are running the asylum. But its only by listening to and valuing the ideas of our 21st century students that we will find solutions to many of our thorniest education problems. For example, putting a Webcam in every classroom is a digital native way to show administrators and parents what really goes on. Teachers could also volunteer for this activity to document and share best practices. Students could quite feasibly invent technological solutions to streamline homework submission and correction, freeing up teachers for more meaningful work. Encouraged to share their expertise, students can be a teachers best resource for suggesting better access to technology, defining the kinds of technology that teachers should be using in the classroom, and showing teachers how they can use specific hardware and software tools to teach more effectively.
Flexible Organization
In this century, we must find alternatives to our primary method of education organization, what I call herding. Herding is students involuntary assignment to specific classes or groups, not for their benefit but for ours. Nobody likes to be herded, and nobody learns best in that environment. As educators become teacherds rather than teachers, we all lose. And creating smaller schools or classrooms is no solution if the result is simply moving around smaller herds. There are two effective 21st century alternatives to herding. The first is one-to-one personalized instruction, continually adapted to each student as he or she learns. This practice has become next to impossible with growing class sizes, but it is still doable. Modern computer and video games have already figured out how to adapt every moment of an experience to a players precise capabilities and skills. So has computerized adaptive testing. Classrooms need to capitalize on students individual capabilities and skills in the same way. How can we make our instruction more adaptive and, as a result, far more effective? Just ask the students; theyll know. Adaptivity, along with connectivity, is where digital technology will have its greatest impact on education. The second alternative to herding is having all learning groups self-select. Kids love working with their friends, especially virtually. Im not saying, of course, that students should join any group in this context, but that they should be able to choose their own learning partners rather than having teachers assign them. Optimally and under proper supervision, a 4th grader in one school could choose a learning partner
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in any 4th grade class in the world. Teachers could also guide students in selecting an approved adult expert to partner with. If we let our students choose all the groups they want to be part of, without forcing them into any one group, we will all be better off. One great advantage of virtual groups over herds is that nobody gets left out. Everybody can find someone in the world to work with. Teachers and administrators must be willing to set this up, provide the necessary vetting, and let it happen.
Digital Tools
Todays students have mastered a large variety of tools that we will never master with the same level of skill. From computers to calculators to MP3 players to camera phones, these tools are like extensions of their brains. Educating or evaluating students without these tools makes no more sense to them than educating or evaluating a plumber without his or her wrench. One of the most important tools for 21st century students is not the computer that we educators are trying so hard to integrate, but the cell phone that so many of our schools currently ban. Cell Phones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century, blared a recent front-page New York Times headline (LaFraniere, 2005). They can catapult our students into the future as well. Cell phones have enormous capabilities these days: voice, short messaging service (SMS), graphics, user-controlled operating systems, downloadable apps, browsers, camera functions (still and video), and geopositioning. Some have sensors, fingerprint readers, and voice recognition. Thumb keyboards and styluses as well as plug-in screens and headphones turn cell phones into both input and output mechanisms. The voice capabilities of the cell phone can help users access language or vocabulary training or narrate a guided tour. Teachers could deliver interactive lessons over a cell phone and use short messaging service to quiz or tutor students. Students could access animations in such subjects as anatomy and forensics. Students will soon be able to download programs into all their cell phones, opening up new worlds of learning. In Europe, China, Japan, and the Philippines, the public is already using mobile phones as learning tools. We in the United States need to join them and overcome objections that students are using them for cheating (so make the tests open book!) or for inappropriate picture taking (so instill some responsibility!). In the United Kingdom, teachers are evaluating student projects over mobile phones. The student describes the project, and the teacher analyzes the students voiceprint for authentication. Lets admit that the real reason we ban cell phones is that, given the opportunity to use them, students would vote with their attention, just as adults vote with their feet by leaving the room when a presentation is not compelling. Why shouldnt our students have the same option with their education when educators fail to deliver compelling content?
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Programming
The single most important differentiator between 20th century analog and 21st century digital technology is programmability. Programming is perhaps the key skill necessary for 21st century literacy. In this arena, teachers and schools are stuck in ancient times. If you wanted to get something written back then, you had to find a scribe; today, you need a programmer. All 21st century kids are programmers to some degree. Every time they download a song or ring tone, conduct a Google search, or use any software, they are, in fact, programming. To prepare kids for their 21st century lives, we must help them maximize their tools by extending their programming abilities. Many students are already proficient enough in programs like Flash to submit their assignments in this medium. Schools should actively teach students this technology and encourage them to use it. Of course, extending this literacy with our current teaching corps is problematic. A number of teachers I know have taken matters into their own hands, creating programming coursesespecially in popular game programmingfor students during the summer months, after school, and even in class. We need to capture these approaches and curriculums and make them available over the Web for all to use. Teachers can also arrange for certain students to teach these classes to their peers. In addition, outside experts are often willing to volunteer their services.
Legacy Versus Future Learning

Currently, the curriculums of the pastthe legacy part of our kids learningare interfering with and cutting into the future curriculum, the skills and knowledge that students need for the 21st century. We need to consolidate and concentrate important legacy knowledge and make room in school for 21st century learning. Our schools should be teaching kids how to program, filter knowledge, and maximize the features and connectivity of their tools. Students should be learning 21st century subject matter, such as nanotechnology, bioethics, genetic medicine, and neuroscience. This is a great place for involving guest teachers from professions doing cutting-edge work in these emerging fields. If every district or school found just one expert willing to contribute his or her expertise; set up and videotaped a meaningful series of Q&A exchanges with students; and put those videos on the Web, enhancing them with additional relevant materials, wed soon have a 21st century curriculum. Students want and deserve to receive this content through 21st century tools that are powerful, programmable, and customizablethrough tools that belong to them. We could offer this content to them on their cell phones, for example. A big part of our problem is figuring out how to provide this before the end of the 21st century.
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School Versus After School

Pragmatically, our 21st century kids education is quickly bifurcating. The formal half, school, is becoming an increasingly moribund and irrelevant institution. Its only function for many students is to provide them with a credential that their parents say they need. The informal, exciting half of kids education occurs after school. This is the place where 21st century students learn about their world and prepare themselves for their 21st century lives. It is revealing that one of the most prevalent student demands regarding technology is to keep their schools computer labs open until midnight (and for us to stay out of their way while they are there). It is equally telling that so many software and Web programs aimed at enhancing kids education are designed for after-school rather than in-school use. If our schools in the 21st century are to be anything more than holding pens for students while their parents work, we desperately need to find ways to help teachers integrate kids technology-rich after-school lives with their lives in school. It doesnt help if, in the words of Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, the cookies on my daughters computer know more about her interests than her teachers do. It helps even less that a great many of our teachers and administrators have no idea what a cookie or a blog or a wiki even is.
Student Voice
Our students, who are empowered in so many ways outside their schools today, have no meaningful voice at all in their own education. Their parents voices, which up until now have been their proxies, are no longer any more closely aligned with students real education needs than their teachers voices are. In the 21st century, this lack of any voice on the part of the customer will soon be unacceptable. Some organizations are trying to change this. For example, Project Tomorrow (www.projecttomorrow.org) conducts an annual online student survey of technology use through its Speak Up Days. All school districts should participate in this survey. Then, instead of hearing from just the 200,000 students who responded in the last survey, we would know what 50 million of them are thinking. Districts would receive valuable input from their students that they could apply to improving instruction. As we educators stick our heads up and get the lay of the 21st century land, we would be wise to remember this: If we dont stop and listen to the kids we serve, value their opinions, and make major changes on the basis of the valid suggestions they offer, we will be left in the 21st century with school buildings to administer but with students who are physically or mentally somewhere else.
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References
LaFraniere, S. (2005, Aug. 25). Cell phones catapult rural Africa to 21st century. New York Times on the Web. Available: http://msn-cnet.com.com/Cell+phones+catapult+rural+Africa+to+21st+centu ry/2100-1039_3-5842901.html Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 12. Available: www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20 Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
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Young minds, fast times

The 21st Century Digital Learner
Published in Edutopia magazine, June 2008 2008 Marc Prensky
I give presentations to educators at every level, all around the world. All of the audience members are earnestly trying to adapt their educational system to the 21st century. During my talks, however, I typically look out at oceans of white hair. NeverI cant even say rarelyis a kid in sight or invited to the party. It is a measure of the malaise of our educational system that these old folksmart and experienced as they may bethink they can, by themselves and without the input of the people theyre trying to teach, design the future of education. One of the strangest things in this age of young peoples empowerment is how little input our students have into their own education and its future. Kids who out of school control large sums of money and have huge choices on how they spend it have almost no choices at all about how they are educatedthey are, for the most part, just herded into classrooms and told what to do and when to do it. Unlike in the corporate world, where businesses spend tens of millions researching what their consumers really want, when it comes to how we structure and organize our kids education, we generally dont make the slightest attempt to listen to, or even care, what students think about how they are taught. This is unacceptable and untenable. Its also dangerous. We treat our students the way we treated women before suffragetheir opinions have no weight. But just as we now insist that women have an equal voice in politics, work, and other domains, we will, I predict, begin accepting and insisting that students have an equal voice in their own education. Or else our students will drop out (as they are doing), shoot at us (ditto), sue us, riot, or worse. So, whenever and wherever I speak, I do my best to bring my own students to the meetings. I ask my hosts to select a panel of a half-dozen or so kids of different grade levels, genders, and abilities to talk with me and the audience. I ask only that the students be articulate and willing to speak their minds in front of an audience of educators. Some groups embrace the idea enthusiastically; others are wary. A few tell me they just cant find kidsand this, from teachersor cite some rule that prevents kids from being there. Nonetheless, I persist, both hoping for an effective panel and believing that the group will provide a model for integrating student input about their education into schooling and planning. What do I find? Almost all the groups are pleased and surprised by the result. In fact, the student panels are generally the highlight of my appearances. This comment after a discussion in front of the West Virginia Department of Education is typical: It was the best thing weve ever done. By design, I typically dont meet the students until just before I speak, and my only instructions are to tell the truth as much as you feel comfortable. I never know what the kids are going to say. One colleague told me, Thats really brave. I dont see it that way. I see the panels as an opportunity to hear what the students think whatever that may be. Listening to our students is always interesting and worthwhile, whether the kids are speaking their own minds (almost always the case) or
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whether they are channeling careful coaching they have received in advance from their teachers and parents (which happens occasionally, and is always quite obvious). My approach, when conducting these panels, is to first ask the students a few setup questions: What experiences in school really engaged you? How do you use technology in school as opposed to outside of school? What are your pet peeves? The kids are allowed to pass if they dont want to answer, which takes some of the how they want to learn. When I first started doing these panels, I regret, I took no notes. But over the past year I have tried to write down as many of the comments as possible. I have heard some enormously insightful comments from the students, particularly about the differences between students and their teachers. There is so much difference between how students think and how teachers think, offered a female student in Florida. A young man commented, You think of technology as a tool. We think of it as a foundationits at the basis of everything we do. A lot of teachers make a PowerPoint and they think theyre so awesome, said a girl in Florida. But its just like writing on the blackboard. A student in Albany, New York, pleaded the case for using technology in the classroom: If its the way we want to learn, and the way we can learn, you should let us do it. One teacher queried, Do computers cut you off from the world? Not at all, said an excited student: We share with others and get help. Technology helpsit strengthens interactions so we can always stay in touch and play with other people. Ive never gone a day without talking to my friends online. One California high school student served up a dose of common sense: Kids grew up around computers. They love them. Their computers are their second teachers at home. A student in West Virginia offered this nugget: If I were using simulation in school, that would be the sweetest thing ever! More than half of all secondary school students are excited about using mobile devices to help them learn; only 15 percent of school leaders support this idea. Blah, Blah, Blah OK, so kids love computers. They all agree on that. Theres another thing they agree on: No matter where I go in the worldthe United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, or New Zealandstudents are mind-numbingly bored in class. Listen up: Im bored 99 percent of the time. (California) School is really, really boring. (Virginia) We are so bored. (Texas) Engage us more. (Texas)
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[My teachers] bore me so much I dont pay attention. (Detroit) Pointless. Im engaged in two out of my seven classes. (Florida) The disconnect between what students want and what theyre receiving is significant, said Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow, which tracks youth culture. Student frustration is rising. Ive heard some teachers claim that this is nothing new. Kids have always been bored in school. But I think now its different. Some of the boredom, of course, comes from the contrast with the more engaging learning opportunities kids have outside of school. Others blame it on todays continuous partial attention (CPA), a term coined by Linda Stone, who researches trends and their consumer implications. Stone describes CPA as the need to be a live node on the network, continually text messaging, checking the cell phone, and jumping on email. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis, she writes. We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything. CPA differs from multitasking, which is motivated by a desire to be more efficient and typically involves tasks that demand little cognitive processing. We file and copy while were talking on the phone and checking email, for instance. But is this really new? I dont think so. In fact, I think it has always been the case. Excluding emergencies, or other experiences in which ones adrenaline is flowing, humans typically always have multiple things on their minds. Still others attribute the boredom to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but the T-shirt I recently saw a kid wearing in Rockefeller Center belies this theory: Its Not Attention DeficitIm Just Not Listening! The reason todays kids are bored is none of the above. If you believe the opinions of kids around the world (and you ignore them at your peril), the source of the problem is abundantly clear, and its this: Todays kids hate being talked at. They hate when teaching is simply telling. They hate lectures and tune them out. Ive heard teachers argue that some subjects and topics need to have lectures, but, in reality, this is only a justification for the failure of those teachers to change how they teach. It is absolutely not true; there are other ways, in any discipline, to get students to learn exactly the same material without lecturesas well as without worksheets, something else the kids tell us they really hate. There are better ways to help todays students learn, and the students expect us, as the adults in the room, to know how to use them. They say, for example, If you made it more interesting we would respond better. And, If you give us a goal to get to, well get there. Students universally tell us they prefer dealing with questions rather than answers, sharing their opinions, participating in group projects, working with real-world issues and people, and having teachers who talk to them as equals rather than as inferiors. Hopefully, this is useful information for teachers and other educatorsand it is important that educators realize just how universal these opinions are.
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Nearly two-thirds of secondary school students want to use laptops, cell phones, or other mobile devices at school. My Brain Is Exploding... For me, though, the best part of the student panels is always hearing the kids answers to my final question. I ask about their experience that day and whether their soapbox proved useful. How do you like being able to talk to your teachers and supervisors about your learning? I ask. I truly love their answers: I like the fact that we become equals. Students do not get the opportunity that often to share their ideas. If students and teachers could collaborate, a lot more would get done. (Anaheim, California) A lot of students careyou just dont realize it. (Poway, California) Most of the time, the teachers are talking and I want to go to sleep. But now my brain is exploding. (Poway, California) Dont let this be a onetime thing. (Poway, California) I think its important that you take time to see what we feel. (West Virginia) Now you know what we think and how we feel. Hopefully, that will go to the heart. (Texas) I waited twelve years for this. (Texas) I wouldnt have believed it if I hadnt seen it! (Texas) As a general rule, you dont hear from kids unless theyve gotten into trouble. (Anaheim, California) Both groups [teachers and students] can learn from each other. (Anaheim, California) If you dont talk to us, you have no idea what were thinking. (Hawaii) Clearly, the kids find it valuable to share with their educators their opinions on how they want to learn. Although skeptical, they hope those teachers and administrators who are trying to improve their education think so, too, and listen carefully to what the students have to say. Again, quoting the kids: It would be good if teachers have this conversation with us on the first day. But often, they dont change anything. (Texas) I hope this didnt just go in one ear and out the other. (Texas) Have there been any quantifiable results in terms of real changes to the students daily lives? Its hard (and probably early) to tell, although I do know for certain that the panels have had an influence on the administrators in the audiences. Many superintendents have invited me back to do the talks and panels again for their principals and teachers. Australian administrators distributed a three-CD set of the kids discussions to every teacher they supervise. My great hope is that, once modeled, these types of conversations will be repeated frequently in our schools, in the United States, and around the world.
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Bottom-Up Input
After hosting dozens of these conversations, I realize one thing: We just dont listen enough to our students. The tradition in education has been not to ask the students what they think or want, but rather for adult educators to design the system and curriculum by themselves, using their superior knowledge and experience. But this approach no longer works. Not that the inmates should run the asylum, but as twenty-first-century leaders in business, politics, and even the military are finding out, for any system to work successfully in these times, we must combine topdown directives with bottom-up input. As the students have told me on more than one occasion, We hope educators take our opinions into account and actually do something! Until we do, their education will not be the best we can offer.
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Turning on the lights

Compared with students technology-infused lives outside of school, the traditional classroom is a somber place
Published in Educational Leadership magazine, March 2008 (Vol. 65 No. 6 pp 40-45) 2008 Marc Prensky
For most of history, kids grew up in the dark intellectually. Right up until the mid20th century, when television became widespread, the world outside their own neighborhoods was largely unknown to them. Few traveled. Some heard tales of adventure, war, or derring-do. Many parents told stories of just how dangerous out there really was. Few young people read widely. In terms of knowing the world you lived in, as a kid you were pretty much left in the dark.
Until you got to school

That was the beginning of your enlightenmentthe day your window opened on the outside world. As you advanced up the grades, the window opened wider, and more and more light shone in. From your teachers, you learned wonderful things you knew to be truebecause they told you so. They taught you to read and, as a result, more of the world became available to you. The images you came across in books and the artifacts you discovered in museums broadened your knowledge. Over time, your teachers taught you how to conduct experiments, test ideas, and separate fact from fiction. They showed you systems and frameworks that would help you understand history, geography, mathematics, science, and your own and other cultures. You were exposed to civilizations greatest accomplishments and learned about famous men and women. You learned to think logically, structure your ideas and thoughts, and write them down for others to read and critique. Not every kid found school interesting, of course, and some left earlier than others. But for a great many students, school was truly empowering. It exposed kids for the first time to a wide variety of useful things they knew nothing about, in ways that the students were unable to do on their own. In fact, one of the key purposes of school was to lead as many kids as possible out of the intellectual darkness into the intellectual light. That is what made being an educator a truly noble calling: We were the people who showed the kids the light.
Plugged in and Connected

Theres one big problem with this noble thought today: Todays kids grow up in the light. Theyre deeply immersed in it long before todays educators ever see them. Kids today are connected to the entire world around the clock, in real time, through their media and their myriad personal devices, both electronic (such as TV) and digital (such as the Internet and cell phones). In the 21st century, young people certainly dont grow up with perfect understanding of the worldafter all, they are still kids.
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But can we still characterize their intellectual state as one of ignorance and darkness? Hardly. Thanks to technology, kids in developed countries grow up knowing about, or being able to find out about, pretty much anything from the past or present that interests them. Google, Wikipedia, and millions of reference sites stand at their beck and call. Many 21st-century kids grow up literally surrounded by light, from the first flash of the digital camera at the moment of birth. They progress to seeing the world through the glow of the TV tube, the sheen of the silver screen, the interactive animations of the computer screen, the LCD on their cell phone, and the screens on their Game Boy Advance consoles, Nintendo DS Lites, and PlayStation Portable Systems. They teach one another to actively participate as often as possible in the worldlocally and around the globethrough instant messaging, e-mails, and increasingly free telephone calls, as well as online connections, discussions, and creative social and communal activities that range from making and sharing music, to helping to slow global warming, to helping to stop genocide in Darfur. Long before they ever get to school, kids have seen a tremendous amount of the world. Theyve watched wars in far-off countries and explorations of distant planets. Theyve seen wild animals up close. Theyve simulated racing, flying, and running businesses. Many have taught themselves to read through the electronic games they play. The world is no longer a dark, unknown place for todays school kids. School kids minds are not intellectually empty. Even though some of what they know may be incomplete, biased, or wrong, they arrive at school full of knowledge, thoughts, ideas, and opinions about their world and their universe.
Powering Down in School

Given this new state of affairs, one might suppose that educators would acknowledge that todays kids grow up differently and that kids are enlightened by all their various connections to the world. Educators would figure out ways to use, build on, and strengthen students reservoirs of knowledge. They would assume that kids will use their connections to the light to find information quickly, structure it in new ways, and communicate with peers around the world in a powerful, 21st century learning process. Teachers would no longer be the providers of information but instead would be the explainers, the context providers, the meaning makers, and the evaluators of information that kids find on their own. Teaching would still be a noble calling, perhaps even more so than before. But weve chosen something else. Somehow, schools have decided that all the light that surrounds kidsthat is, their electronic connections to the worldis somehow detrimental to their education. So systematically, as kids enter our school buildings, we make them shut off all their connections. No cell phones. No music players. No game machines. No open Internet. When kids come to school, they leave behind the intellectual light of their everyday lives and walk into the darkness of the old-fash22

ioned classroom. What are they allowed to use? Basal readers. Cursive handwriting. Old textbooks. Outdated equipment. Whenever I go to school, says one student I know, I have to power down. Hes not just talking about his deviceshes talking about his brain. Schools, despite our best intentions, are leading kids away from the light.
The Boredom Crisis

The reality is that todays students are, for the most part, bored. Pick an average kid, with an average schedule, and shadow him or her for a day in schoolgo where the student goes, sit in on all his or her classesand see if you can stand it. Recently, at a conference of the heads of Californias top independent schools, I asked a bright 10-year-old from one of the very best schools how often shes bored in class. Ninetynine percent of the time was her immediate answer she didnt even have to reflect. Even with the best teachers we have, most middle school and high school kids say theyre bored 5070 percent of the time. And it makes perfect sense. A kid who has seen lunar landings and rovers working on Mars, who has done lots of research on the Internet on astronomy, and who comes to school excited about space travel may likely hear, If you want to go to outer space, learn your math. But the math she learns is not about spaceits 1,200-year-old algebra and 4,000-year-old Egyptian geometry. A kid who has read and enjoyed the Harry Potter books must, in general, learn the rules of writing, spelling, and literary analysis not from the science fiction and fantasy books he enjoys, but from the books in the official curriculum. A kid who masters the electronic games Caesar III, Age of Kings, Age of Empires, Civilization IV, and Rise of Nations, and therefore knows a lot about world history, is likely to hear, I dont know whats in those games, but the information may be incorrect. And besides, the history you should care about is what will be on the test. School instruction is still mostly cookie cutter and one size fits all, despite the fact that we live in an era of customizationstudents continually customize their buddy lists, photos, ring tones, cell phone skins, Web sites, blogs, and MySpace and Facebook accounts. Moreover, with large class sizes and hundreds of kids to a counselor, schools are unlikely to be able to discover kids passions and address their education from that base.
Where Kids Learn

Less in School
In the United States and other developed countries, education is quickly splitting into two separateand unequalparts. One part is school, i.e. the education that kids, for the most part, are obliged to experience by law. In exchange, school offers credentialsa diploma and a set of gradesthat help determine students future education and employment.
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But many students find that schooling is almost entirely irrelevant to their present and future lives. For one thing, school is usually about the pastwhat weve learned up until this point (or some point a while ago) about math, science, language, and social studieswith, occasionally, a bit of current events thrown in. School is certainly not about the future, which kids tell us is their most pressing concern. If schools were future-oriented, they would be full of classes in programming, multimedia literacy and creation, astronautics, bioethics, genomics, and nanotechnology. Science fiction and fantasy literature, as representative of alternative visions of the future, would be a part of the curriculum. Students would be learning and practicing such future-oriented skills as collaborating around the world electronically and learning to work and create in distributed teams. Some educators justify the focus on the past by saying, We dont even know what tomorrows jobs will bethey havent been invented yet. Perhaps. Yet we do know many, if not all, of tomorrows needed skillswere just not focusing on teaching them in school. Instead, school covers material. It prepares kids for standardized exams. It continues to offer, for a ton of familiar reasonssuch as No Child Left Behind, standards, and parent pressurean outdated education that most students find irrelevant.
Than After School

There is another dimension to our kids education, one that I call after-school. Afterschool education is whatever the kids learn when theyre not in class, doing their homework, or preparing for or taking tests. Some after-school learningsuch as robotics clubs, competitions, and browsing in computer labstakes place in our school buildings. But after-school learning goes much further. It encompasses all the time kids spend on the Internet at home. It includes all their blogging and social networking in MySpace or Facebook. After-school includes all the time kids spend sharing messages and pictures, talking on their cell phones, and creating many of the hundreds of thousands of videos posted on YouTube. It includes the time kids spend playing complex electronic games like Runescape and World of Warcraft and exploring online nongame worlds such as Whyville, Club Penguin, and Second Life, which are huge learning environments. After-school includes game and other computer programming classes that kids either sign up for or teach themselves. It includes an increasing number of noncurricular summer courses, learning camps, and other learning activities. Its their after-school education, not their school education, thats preparing our kids for their 21st-century livesand they know it. This after-school education doesnt bore them because, among other things, they help design it. Its different for every one of them. And there are no exams, only clear levels of competence that everyone knows and respects.
How to Turn On the Lights

To make education relevant to students lives and truly prepare kids for the future, we need to bring these after-school attractions into our schools. Four important practices can help.
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Give students the opportunity to use technology in school. This is less about teachers mastering specific tools or techniquessuch as electronic games, blogs, or search enginesthan their being willing to allow students to use these tools to find information and create products. We vastly underestimate our students ability in technological areas and vastly inflate the threat of harm. These two perceptions have the combined effect of locking students in the past. Some school districts have taken a different path. For several years, students at Mabry Middle School, Cobb County, Georgia, have created 2- to 3-minute videos for a school Oscars program. The videos tackle such topics as immigration, adoption, physical fitness, homelessness, technology, and child labor (see http:// mabryonline.org/archives/mtv). The judges, many of whom work in the communications and media industries, select winning films in such categories as best cinematography, best sound, best documentary, best dramatic comedy, and best teaching and learning film. These are the kinds of products we should expect from our kids. Schools can address the inappropriate use issue, particularly in the higher grades, with one simple rule: If something comes on the screen that a student knows shouldnt be there, he or she has two seconds to shut off the computeror lose all privileges. Once they let students (particularly in groups) take the lead on technology projects, teachers tend to see more engagement and better results. As students share works in progress with the class for critical evaluation from both teacher and students, the teacher takes on the valuable roles of explainer, context provider, meaning maker, and evaluator/coach. Find out how students want to be taught. This means devoting a meaningful amount of school time (and after-school time if possible) to conversing with students. It also involves promoting discussions on this topic among students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Such discussions might take the form of assemblies moderated, perhaps, by invited guests, such as a local law school professor with expertise at letting all groups have their say. Students would be invited to attend and contribute to the discussion. Both students and teachers have told me that in addition to using technology in school, students like having goals they want to reach, doing rather than listening, getting involved with the real world, having teachers ask them about their ideas and opinions, creating products that are important to them, and thinking seriously about their futures. Connect students to the real world. Todays students know that if they post something on YouTube, the entire world can see itand comment. Many kids are in touch, through instant messaging, with friends and relatives around the world. So if students are studying the Middle East, why arent they hooked up with Middle Eastern kids their own age? If theyre learning Spanish, why arent they connecting with kids in Latin America? If theyre studying societies in social studies class, why arent they exchanging videos showing their respective views of their own society? Understand where kids are goingthat is, into the futureand help them get there. Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, said management
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thinker Charles Handy, a posture which may be uncomfortable, but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can. Covering the material and preparing kids for the test is not preparing them for the future. To find out the skills students need, look, for example, at the work of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, which highlights such areas as computer and technology skills, critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork and collaboration, ethics and responsibility, and global awareness. And keep in mind as well that to add all of these skills, some things we currently teach will have to be deleted, as we are already attempting to teach more than we have time for. By engaging in these four practices, schools have a shot at being part of the creatively preparing students for the future process rather than just giving it up to afterschool programs. To participate meaningfully in our kids futures, schools must be willing, finally, to turn on the lights.
Prenskys Principles for Principals

Announce that henceforth students will have a meaningful voice in setting all school policy regarding technology use. Hold assemblies that include teachers, students, parents, administrators, and technologists to hear all points of view and establish school policies regarding such issues as blocked Web sites and use of cell phones. Make it your business to eliminate boredom from your schoolmake 100 percent engagement the goal. Poll students as to which of their teachers and classes are engaging and which are boring and why. Investigate and take action. Talk with 24 students each day for at least one-half hour about their learning. If you feel you cant spare that time to engage with kids, you may need to rethink your priorities. Work with both students and teachers to implement the new kids teaching themselves with guidance model. Eliminate lectures and busywork from your school. Ask teachers who use active learning to share their practices with their colleagues. Promote technology use and move toward one-to-one computing. Orient your school toward the future. Offer classes in programming, robotics, long-distance collaboration, and cutting-edge science. Keep the computer lab open late and on weekends, especially in areas with limited technology access. Introduce computerized exercise games that kids really enjoy, such as Dance Dance Revolution, into your physical education classes. Have students share your schools most effective practices and results with the world via YouTube.
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Backup education?
Backup education?
Too many teachers see education as preparing kids for the past, not the future.
Published in Educational Technology magazine, Vol. 48 No 1, Jan-Feb 2008 2008 Marc Prensky
A disturbing voice has emerged in the questions that teachers ask after my talks. Reacting to my discussing the need to delete things from the curriculum in order to make room for topics about the future, teachers almost invariably ask some version of the following: But what if the technology breaks down? What will our kids do then? For example: The power went down in a store the other day and the workers couldnt make change. Just the other day our bus broke down on the highway. Didnt you read about the cyber-attack in Estonia? Teachers who ask these questions and voice these opinions often get applause from their colleagues in the audience, making them think they are right in holding these attitudes. But these questions make me (and the students on my panels) realize that we have a real problem. Of course technology will break down. And of course some people may not know what to do until its fixed. So why is the teachers attitude a problem? Its a problem because what the teachers are really saying is this: We dont trust the technology of today, or the future. We dont trust the world in which you kids are going to live. We believe the way we did it in our time was the real way, the only reliable way, and thats what we want to teach you kidsthe basics. (Thats why they all applaud the idiotic video showing people on a stopped escalator just standing there calling for help.)
Confusing Methods with Basics

Unfortunately, thinking that many of the things we have students learn and memorizefrom the multiplication tables, to the long division algorithm, to making change, to the state capitalsare the basics is confusing the best method of the moment with what is actually important to know. The reason we memorized so many of these things in the past was only because there was no handy/speedy way to look them up. But the best methods to the basics change over time. For example, telling time is a basic. At one time the best method we had was the sundial. Now we all just strap a machine to our wrist. Math basics are the meaning and proper use of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, not the methods (i.e. algorithms) we use to perform those functions. Currently our best method for math is a calculator that we always have easy access to (perhaps strapped to our wrists as well). Communication, too, is a basic skill, with reading and writing merely the best methods of the moment. Now both reading and writing are both very useful methods of
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communicating, which, to be clear, I think we need to teach until better ways emerge for getting the same information. But once all books are recorded, the Web reads itself, and every child and adult has a text scanner in his or her cell phone that can read any printed text aloud, should we still spend all those years teaching our kids phonics? Writing is merely a method for recording thoughts. Not long ago neat cursive penmanship was the best method we had for this, because it was faster than printing and universally legible. Now we have better methods, such as phones, recording machines, IM, and keyboarding. As our kids all get their own phones and laptops, do we really need to teach them the old ways?
Backup Education
What the teachers described earlier are advocating that we teach our kids is not the basics, at all, but rather a backup education of old methodsones that are now useful only in unlikely emergencies. Those who continue to teach kids things they need to know only when stuff breaks down are doing those kids an enormous disservice. There is rarely a need to go back to the old ways, even when technology breaks down. Typically we are inconvenienced a bit, then we fix what is broken and move on. The real issue lies in the fact that by continuing to teach the backup stuff, there is no room to teach for the future. Within the working lives of our students, technology will become a trillion times more powerful, likely more powerful than the human brain. What will serve our kids better in 20 yearsmemorized multiplication tables or fundamental knowledge of programming concepts? Long division algorithms or the ability to think logically and to estimate? The ability to write cursive handwriting or the ability to create meaningfully in multimedia? (And thats just for elementary schoolthe same applies to the higher grades as well).
Irony
The irony is that by the time todays elementary students get to the work force, many of the breakdown scenarios the teachers describe will be structurally unable to occur. Making change, for example, will likely be gone altogether, as cash is replaced by our automated cell phone wallets. And while the dystopic scenario of everything breaking down at once (and only those with pre-twenty-first century skills surviving) may make a good movie, it is incredibly unlikely to happen. (If it does, well have larger issues than kids not knowing the multiplication tables). Those teachers who want to give their kids a backup education cant understand or accept that the world of their students is diverging incredibly quickly from their own. They dont understand that their well-intentioned instinct to protect their kids actually has the opposite effectit prevents their kids from learning what they need to know to succeed in the twenty-first century. Obviously, not all teachers believe backup education is the right way to go. But enough do, judging from the applause I hear, to seriously put our childrens future at risk. So if the issue of backup education comes up in your neighborhood, resist it with all youve got. Our kids future depends on it.
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Programming is the new Literacy

Power will soon belong to those who can master a variety of expressive human-machine interactions
Published in Edutopia magazine, March 2008 2008 Marc Prensky
Already, various thinkers about the future have proposed a number of candidates for the designation twenty-first-century literacy. That is, what are the key skills humans must possess in order to be considered literate? Some writers assume that the definition of literacy will continue to be what it always has been: The ability to carefully read and write a contemporary spoken language. Others specify that the term will apply only to fluency in one or more of the languages spoken by the largest numbers of people, those certain to be important over the next nine decades of the century; candidates include Spanish, English, or Mandarin Chinese. Still others expand the notion of twenty-first-century literacy beyond spoken and written language to include the panoply of skills often collected under the umbrella term multimedia (being able to both understand and create messages, communications, and works that include, or are constructed with, visual, aural, and hapticthat is, physicalelements as well as words). Some go on to find important emerging literacy in interactivity and games. And there are those who say it includes all of the above, and might include other factors as well. I am one of these last, in that I believe fluency with multiple spoken languages will continue to be important, and that multimedia, interactivity, and other game-derived devices will be increasingly significant tools for communicating twenty-firstcentury thought. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that the true key literacy of the new century lies outside all these domains. I believe the single skill that will, above all others, distinguish a literate person is programming literacy, the ability to make digital technology do whatever, within the possible one wants it to doto bend digital technology to ones needs, purposes, and will, just as in the present we bend words and images. Some call this skill human-machine interaction; some call it procedural literacy. Others just call it programming. Seem strange? Im sure it does. Today, people with highly developed skills in this area are seen as nerds. But consider that as machines become even more important components of our communication, our work, our education, our travel, our homes, and our leisure, the ability to make them do what we want will become increasingly valuable. Already, today, a former programmer in Seattle, one of these very nerds, is one of the richest people in the world. So, in a sense, we are going to see as we progress through the twenty-first century a real revenge of the nerds, except that the new nerds will be our programmatically literate children. As programming becomes more important, it will leave the back room and become a key skill and attribute of our top intellectual and social classes, just as reading and writing did in the past. Remember, only a few centuries ago, reading and writing were confined to a small specialist class whose members we called scribes.
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Do you HTML?
One might ask, Will every educated person really have to program? Cant the people who need programming just buy it? Possibly. Of course, with that model, we have in a sense returned to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt, or even before. Then, if you needed to communicate your thoughts on paper, you couldnt do it yourself. You had to hire a better-educated persona scribewho knew the writing code. Then, at the other end, you needed someone to read or decode itunless, of course, you were well educated, that is, you had been taught to read and write and thus had become literate. Heres a key question: Will the need for a separate scribe tribe of programmers continue through the twenty-first century, or will the skill set of an educated person soon include programming fluency? I think that as programming becomes increasingly easy (which it will) and as the need to show rather than explain becomes important (which it will) and as people working together want to combine the results of their efforts and ideas instantaneously (which they will), educated people will, out of necessity, become programmers. Think of it: Your phone and car already require programming skills; many houses and jobs do, too. Programming will soon be how we interact with all our objects, and I believe it will be an important component of how we interact with one another as well. Of course, there are already Luddites who think a digital machine is most elegant if it has only one button (like the Roomba robot floor cleaner) and people who keep searching for a cell phone that only makes phone calls. (Good luck.) There is a hierarchy of levels of making machines do what you want (that is, programming them) that runs from manipulating a single on-off switch to managing menus, options, and customization to coding higher-level programming languages (Flash, HTML, scripting) and lower-level languages (C++, Java) to creating assembler or machine language. Few people, however, remain satisfied for long with the first levelas soon as we master that, most of us seek refinements and customization to our own needs and tastes. (The company that makes the Roomba offers a kit to turn its parts into whatever type of robot you want.) Just about every young person programs (controls his or her own digital technology) to some extent. Many actions considered merely taskssetting up a universal television remote, downloading a ringtone, customizing your mobile phone or desktopare really programming. Doing a Web search is programming, as is using peer-to-peer or socialnetworking technologies, or eBay, or creating a document in Word, Excel, MySpace, or Facebookand toss in building your avatar in Second Life. Todays kids are such good programmers that parents who buy expensive high tech gadgets, such as camcorders or home theaters, often hand them to their children to set up (program) for them. Today, most of this programming takes place in what I refer to as higher-level programming languages, consisting of menus and choices rather than the more flexible computer code. Of course, many people will be content with this level of programming (which still manages to baffle many literate adults).
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But as todays kids grow up and become tomorrows educated adults, most will go much further. At an early age, many young people learn the HTML language of Web pages and often branch out into its more powerful sister languages, such as XML and PHP. Other kids are learning programming languages like Game Maker, Flash, and Scratch, plus scripting language, graphics tools, and even C++, in order to build games. They learn them occasionally in school, but mostly on their own, after school, or in specialized summer camps. Why? First, because they realize it gives them the power to express themselves in the language of their own times, and secondand perhaps even more importantlybecause they find it fun.
Want a Program? Hire a Kid

Suppose you have a need for a computer program. Me? you say. Why would I have such a need? But this possibility is not far-fetched at all. For instance, when Howard Dean ran for U.S. president a few years ago, he (or someone on his staff) had this idea: What if we could collect contributions over the Internet? Nobody had ever done this before, because the structure wasnt therethe program had never been written. So he went out and found a young programmeran eighteen-year-old to write the necessary code, and within only a matter of weeks the contributions started pouring in. Most of us have problems a computer or another digital machine could easily solve for us, if only we conceived them as programming problems: What is my best commuting route under different weather or other conditions? What are my statistics in my sports (or hobbies or work), and how do they compare with those of others? What is the optimal configuration of my [you name it]? How close am I to retirement, and will I have enough money? We all have ideas and needs amenable to programming solutions. My guess is that the more educated and literate we are (in the tired twentieth-century sense), the more of these we have. Yet most of us digital immigrantsthose who came to computers and digital technology later in our livesnever even know it. We never realize that our desire to contact certain groups of people at certain times, or to lighten the load of repetitive work (say, grading papers), or to solve certain types of puzzles (like Sudoku), are really programming problems, and quite solvable ones at that. But some among us do realize this, and we hire young peopleoften our kids, students, or employees but equally often consultants selling solutionsto do the necessary programming for us. One result is that we nonprogrammers often get ripped off (charged a lot for something quite simple), say, by financial planners offering seemingly sophisticated tools that, were we the slightest bit literate, we could not only write ourselves but also customize specifically to our needs. Thats not how it will be in the future. As we move further into the twenty-first century, well educated people who have needs and ideas addressable via programming will increasingly be able to recognize this fact and take matters into their own hands.
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The Digital Scribe Tribe

Recently, programming languages ordinary people use have begun to emerge. Of these, one in particularFlash, from Adobeappears to be becoming a de facto standard. A great many kids in elementary school and the middle grades around the world are learning to program in Flash and are continually improving their skills as they advance through the grades. They use this tool and others like it (the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Scratch, for example) to communicate a wide range of information and emotionfrom stories to logic to games to ideas to persuasive arguments to works of art all through programming. And it seems to them not nerdy but, rather, sophisticated and advanced. The young people who do this vary greatly, of course, in the sophistication of what they can do. But sophisticated programming is becoming easier by the day. More and more premade programming objectscode written by others that can simply be plugged in to perform certain tasksare available on the Internet, and are mostly free. These databases of premade parts greatly enhance students abilities, extend their programming and problem-solving capabilities, and shorten the time to get things done. In a sense, these bits of code are like an alphabet of programming. Recently, a friend was asked to program a Wheel of Fortune in Flash. Rather than taking a week to program it from scratch, he did a Web search, found something like what he wanted available free, and finished the project in an hour. With these increasingly available and findable pieces of code, the range of what one can do and communicate with programming can expand indefinitely. And though simpler programs such as Flash already allow a pretty good degree of sophistication, many young people, through game creation, Internet-tool creation, or other means, get into the more sophisticated programming languages of three-dimensional world building, scripting, and entirely abstract, logical programming languages such as Java and C++. And so emerges the new scribe tribe of programmers, reaching into (and eventually becoming) the intellectual elite of the twenty-first century. Programming has already become a tool todays young people use to communicate with one another via such components as machinima (see the definition below), ringtones, emoticons, searches, photo manipulation, and games. Young people email or IM their creations to one another as we do our Word and Excel attachments, often posting them on the Internet for all to see. I bet few among us have not been the recent recipient of an emailed URL pointing us to an interesting program, a greeting card, a YouTube video, a machinima, or a game. (And, of course, Word and Excel are programming languages in themselves, with enormously sophisticated programming capabilities built in via macros and scripting.) Flash: A program that lets users create vector-based animation Machinima: Machine cinema, in which simple tools found in video games are put to unexpected ends Scratch: An easy-to-use programming language developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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As the century goes on, those who dont programwho cant bend their increasingly sophisticated computers, machines, cars, and homes to their wills and needswill, I predict, be increasingly left behind. Parents and teachers often disrespect todays young people for being less than literate in the old reading-and-writing sense. But in turn, these young citizens of the future have no respect for adults who cant program a DVD player, a mobile phone, a computer, or anything else. Todays kids already see their parents and teachers as the illiterate ones. No wonder some teachers are scared to bring new technologies into the classroomthe kids just laugh at their illiteracy. So, as the highly literate person of 2008 might start off the day reading the New York Times and firing off a cleverly worded letter to the editor in response to a column, the highly literate person of 2028 may start the day ingesting the news in multiple ways with various types of stories they have programmed to be delivered in a preferred order, each at a preferred speed. And if that person feels a need to express an opinion, a simple bit of programming will allow him or her to determine all the people in the world to whom a response should go, and have it customized for each of them. Or one might program and fire off a video, an animation, or a simulation. As the highly literate adult of today might pen a witty birthday card note for a young niece or nephew, the highly literate adult of tomorrow might program the child a game. And though todays highly literate person may enjoy a sophisticated novel or nonfiction book on a plane or train ride, tomorrows highly literate person may prefer to change, by programming, whatever story or other media he or she is interacting with to suit individual preferences, and might then, with a little more programming, distribute those changes to the world. And, of course, all this extends into the physical world as well thorough robotics and machine programming. Tools have always been important to humans; now, intellectual tools are becoming increasingly significant. Until recently, getting an education and becoming a literate person meant learning to use the set of tools considered essential for each field or discipline. The tools in any endeavor change and improve over time, but they generally do so quite slowly, and new tools are often invented not by ordinary people but by geniuses. Getting an education in a field has long meant gaining mastery of its existing tools. In this century, we will see, I think, something quite different. Using their ever more sophisticated programming skills, ordinary well-educated people will be constantly inventing new tools to solve whatever problems they have. In fact, this will be the expectation of what a literate person does. Already, in many circles (and not only scientific ones, although most are still rather geeky), one often hears someone say, I wrote a little program to do that. And whether its to find Manhattan addresses or to keep track of how many seconds remain until your next paycheck, a typical reaction is, Can I get that? to which the answer is as simple as a URL or a USB key. It takes neither geeks nor armies of people to create useful tools via programming. A woman recently created an extremely useful program to compile and redeem her supermarket coupons. Google was created by two graduate students (Sergey Brin and Larry Page).
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Just one guy (Pierre Omidyar) developed the original program for eBay. Often, from these initial programming ideas come very big companies and profits. (Brin, Page, and Omidyar are all billionaires.) But even if they dont yield huge profits, thousandsand soon millionsof people are beginning to create and share good programs we can all use free. Successful companies train new programmers, who then generate their own ideas and tools, in addition to the tools their companies build. Smart businesses are already searching for young people who can create these new toolsemployees who are twenty-firstcentury literate.
Classified Ad:
Electronic Arts, the worlds biggest video game company, recently created this billboard advertisement written in a programming language. Can you read it? (It says, Now Hiring.) All of which brings us to an important question: If programming (the ability to control machines) is indeed the key literacy of this century, how do we, as educators, make our students literate? This problem is a particularly thorny one, because most teachers, even many of our best math and science instructors, do not possess the necessary skills, even rudimentary ones. Most of the tools (and even the concept of programming) were developed long after these teachers were born or schooled. Can we do it by bringing working programmers into the schools? Not likely. Most of the good ones are busy programming and have no desire to teach. The answer is not yet clear, but we can either come up with creative solutions to this real problem, or, in their absence, the kids will, as they are doing with so many things, figure out ways to teach themselves. Imagine: Literacy without (official) teachers. Our machines are expected, thirty years from now, to be a trillion times more powerful than they are today. Literacy will belong to those who can master not words, or even multimedia, but a variety of powerful, expressive human-machine interactions. If you are from the old school, you may not enjoy hearing this, but I doubt there is anything anyone can do to stop it. Thirty years from now, will the United States be more competitive with a population that can read English at a tenth-grade level or with a population excellent at making the complex machines of that era do their bidding? The two options may be mutually exclusive, and the right choice may determine our childrens place in the worlds intellectual hierarchy.
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Five essential meta-skilss
Five essential meta-skills

(This is the subject of Marc Prenskys next book, coming in 2011 from Corwin Press.)
Published online, at www.marcprensky.com/writing. 2010 Marc Prensky
Almost all people do better when they have a simple, consistent, yet powerful framework to work withinsomething that, oddly enough, todays school and education rarely provides. Unlike much that is offered in education, these five meta-skills can be quickly grasped and memorized by all students and teachers. There is, however, a lifetime of getting good and then better at using and applying them. The five metaskills also emphasize that education doesnt end with schoolschools job is to provide you with the framework that you will use for the rest of your life. The Goal: To be able to follow ones passion(s) as far as ones abilities allow In order to do that, no matter what the future brings, individuals must master the following skills: 1. Figuring out the right thing to do a. Behaving ethically b. Thinking critically c. Setting goals d. Having good judgment e. Making good decisions 2. Getting it done a. Planning b. Solving problems c. Self-directing d. Self-assessing e. Iterating 3. Doing it with others a. Taking leadership b. Communicating/interacting with individuals and groups (especially using technology)
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c. Communicating/interacting with machines (= programming) d. Communicating/interacting with a world audience e. Communicating/interacting across cultures 4. Doing it creatively a. Adapting b. Thinking creatively c. Tinkering and designing d. Playing e. Finding your voice 5. Constantly doing it better a. Reflecting b. Being proactive c. Taking prudent risks d. Thinking long-term e. Continually improving through learning It is the authors thesis that, were we to incorporate all of these skills in every subject, and, starting from elementary school, were we to have all our students, over and over, figure out the right thing to do, get it done, do it with others, do it creatively, and continuously do it better, then, by the time they left school, our students would have practiced these essential skills hundreds, or even thousands of times, and would likely have internalized them as an effective way of doing things. This is exactly the kind of preparation needed for the uncertainties our students will face in their 21st century lives.
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Why YouTube matters
Why YouTube matters

Why it is so important, why we should all be using it, and why blocking it hurts our kids education
Published in On The Horizon. 2010
One of the most exciting things about living in the twenty-first century is watching large societal and cultural changes happen right before your eyes. This is nowhere
Our media mediate our social interaction. When our media change our social interaction changes. Michael Wesch, Kansas State University
better illustrated than in the rapid rise of YouTube. (Twitter has been getting all the press lately; but its long-term import is, I think, far less.) YouTube first launched in 2005, as a way for people to post video clips online. Who knew then that it would launch an entirely new type of communication, and that there would be such a hunger for it? I remember the email asking me to check out the videos my programmer had posted this new site. I cant say I rushed to do it. Now I couldnt do my work without it. I include YouTubes in all my presentations. Watching YouTube now consumes a large portion of many young peoples media time, often taking time away from broadcast or cable television. The number of YouTube clips available to watch is staggering. At the start of 2010 the number is fast approaching 100 million, with roughly 150,000 new clips posted daily. (Thats an additional 5 million clips per year. And thats assuming the rate stays the same; it will probably increase.)
Two-way Communication
Video is the New Text Mark Anderson, Consultant
Perhaps the thing about YouTube that is least understood by people who do not use it regularly is that it is not just one way, or one-to-many, communication; it is designed to be, and very much is, two-way. There are easy-to-use communication and feedback channels built in, including view counts, ratings, text posts to any clip, and in the ability to make and post response video clips, which often happens. Many users post ideas and opinions, looking for feedback, and many get large numbers of responses to their clips. Language students, for example, often post clips and get feedback from native speakers.
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Quantity and Quality

Both the quantity and the quality range of YouTube videos are breathtaking. In only the last 4 years more video has been created and posted than broadcast television created in its entire history. Particularly when you broaden the term YouTube to include the many specialized short video sitesTeacher Tube, School Tube, Big Think, TED, hulu and the many how-to video sitesyou can find, in video, the entire range of human communication, from clueless kids babbling, to sophisticated discourse and dialogue, world-class creations, and deep debates and discussions. As the YouTube slogan, Broadcast Yourself indicates, lots of individuals are pointing a camera at themselves, many for the first time, and saying their piece. Many are young, though more and more are older people, such as geriatric1927 (aka the Silver Surfer) There are people making complex arguments (such as the weather woman who decries, in a YouTube, the math methodologies being taught in certain textbooks), and counter-arguments (such as a math professors responses.) There are bereaved people with the need to express and share their feelings and who find comfort in peoples responses, and there are ranters and shouters. At its core, YouTube is human communication, in all its forms (except, for the moment, synchronous dialog, which requires only the simple add-on of voice and/or text.)
The new text

YouTubes, i.e. short, mostly self-created video clips (as opposed to professional film or television) have become, in the words of consultant Mark Anderson, the new text. They allow complex, multimedia communication to and from anyone with an online computer, and, more and more, a cell phone. This last is key because, given the current rate of uptake, there will soon be a cell phone availableeither individually or sharedto almost everyone on the planet. Although some videos contain text, to get most of the message (even of the most sophisticated) you need only watch and listen. In many cases you dont even have to know English, as many videos have been translated, manually or automatically, or are self-evident without translation.
Key for educators

Why is this new communication formshort, mostly self-created videosso important for educators to understand? The answer is that a huge portion of the worlds knowledge, especially new knowledge, is going uniquely into this form. There is unique video on practically EVERY subject. Banning, or ignoring this work (as often happens in schools) is saying, in effect, We dont want to give our students access to a large part of the worlds knowledge. That is clearly a tough and, I think, untenable position for educators to take. What is most amazing (and, at the same time, alarming to many educators) is just how quickly this whole phenomenon has taken off. When people put the tools to cre38

Why YouTube matters
ate these videos in the hands of individuals, and created an easily accessible place to put them, as well as a relatively easy (although as yet still clunky) way to find them, no one had any idea how big the explosion would be. Who knew that there would be 150,000 people a day uploading videos they had made? Who knew that the desire to capture and share would be so great? I think this took everyone, even YouTubes creators, by surprise. But perhaps it shouldnt have.
Communicating using writing and reading is hard

What many people, particularly educators, often forget (or ignore) is that writing and readingalthough they have enjoyed great success and primacy for several hundred yearsare very artificial and unnatural ways to communicate, store and retrieve information. As most teachers are aware, reading is a skill that is difficult, and often painful, to learn and master. Any cognitive scientist will tell you what a struggle it is to get our brains to do it (as opposed to seeing and talking, which come much, much more naturally to humans.) Reading does not just happen, says University of CaliforniaDavis neurology expert Kathleen Baynes. It is a terrible struggle. Even after hundreds of years of learning to teach it, a great many of our students (although they can watch and listen quite well) still have difficulty with reading and writing. As a result, a great deal of our school time is devoted to training young people to use written mediafirst to decode the squiggles and then to extract meaning. And still, aside from our top-tier students, we are only marginally successful at it. Many countries in the world do not even attempt to make their non-elite students written-word literate. Those like us, who do try, find the task of teaching people to read and write daunting, and the task of getting people, once they have learned, to continuously use and improve those skills, (i.e. to be lifelong readers and writers) even harder. We have a remarkably high percentage of functionally illiterate in the U.S.some claim it is as much as 40 percent.
But new media make it easier

But that doesnt mean, of course, that all these people have stopped communicating. Rather, (and this is a hard one for many to swallow) a large part of our population has already switched to media easier than reading and writing for almost everything. As noted, speaking and listening are much more native to the human brain. Now that we have technological alternatives, written communication, except in certain areas, is rapidly on the wane. The evidence is everywhere. Written letters have been mostly replaced by phone calls. Most news is obtained from listening to people on TV. Even sophisticated arguments, such as Al Gores message about global warming (An Inconvenient Truth) reach far more people via movies, (i.e. listening and watching) than via books. Printed news that was once almost completely texteven the New York Timesis increasingly presented via graphics, op art, online simulations and newsgames. Magazinesespecially text magazineshave lost much of their readership. Newspapers, large and small, are shrinking and going out of business. And even the Internet,
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which, to a certain extent, brought reading and writing back into vogue through Web pages and blogs, is fast moving to short-form video, i.e. to YouTube. Much of the written communication on the web has moved to tiny forms such as Twitter, and these forms are likely to soon be replaced by voice and/or video as well. This massive rejection of reading and writingand substitution of other mediais, of course, not the case for the top 10-20 percent of our population (which includes almost all teachers.) But it certainly is true for the remaining 80 percent.
The future of reading and writing?

So what do we do? Should educators, and society, continue to strugglevaliantly but mostly in vainto make every person in our society literate, in the old, reading and writing sense? Or should we accept that thats a war we wont win and move on to a different, and more useful, goal? Warning: If you are a person who is tied, body and soul, to reading and writing as the form of communication, dontrepeat dontread this. Skip to several paragraphs down. Read on only if you are open to new points of view. Although it is a very difficult thing for many educators and other people to hear and face, and strange as it sounds, the truth is that for most people in the twenty-first century reading and writing are not the best ways to communicate their thoughts and ideas. In fact, for the large majority of twenty-first century Americans they are rarely-used, and not even truly necessary skills, and are quickly on their way to becoming even less so. Let me illustrate: What communication materials do most Americans access today? News? Video is fine. Work- or school-related material? Video does it equally well. Instructions, contracts or legal papers? Someone trusted explaining these to you on video is probably better than trying to reading them yourself. Stories? Recorded versions of the text, or movies telling the same story are (except possibly for purists) equally good substitutes. Training? Learning? Video often does the job better. Books? A Kindle or other device will read them to you. Other written pages you really want to understand? A scanner can easily read them to you (you can currently buy this technology in a pen, and it will soon be a part of our phones.) Signs? Most have moved to symbols. Place names? Again, a small device that can scanning at a distance can do the job just fine. Map reading? GPS and voice technology have pretty much solved that. Searching for information? Currently tougher, perhaps, without reading, but with voice to text and text to voice it soon it wont be. Email? You can already hear it read. Even voting decisions are now made based almost completely on watched and spoken communication (i.e. speeches and TV commercials) and not (except for that small, top percentage of people) on reading. Bemoan this if you will, but its the truth. And writing is even less-widely used. Think of the average, non-college-educated person, once he or she leaves school. Aside from signing their name occasionally, what in life do they need to write? Not a whole lot that couldnt be communicated by voice, video and pictures. A shopping list? Products already exist to record voice memos and shopping lists by talking to your refrigerator. A description of some40

Why YouTube matters
thing? Voice is generally fine, and illustrations make it even better. An evaluation or form to fill out? Can be done on a touch screen with picture cues. A report? Record audio or video. The great advantage of audio and video over writing is that anyone can do it, i.e. anyone can stare at a mic or camera and talk. And increasingly, almost everyone does.
Whom does it serve?

So whom does it serve to have so many of our students struggle so hard (and typically unsuccessfully) for years to get something cogent down on paper, versus the option of learning to carefully present their thoughts in other media with which they are more comfortable and have more mastery? Are we spending all this time and energy teaching reading and writing just so that people can fill in forms and job applications? And if so, wouldnt it make more sense to just change those? Recently, I had a conversation with a soft drink delivery person, who carried a small handheld computer on which he checked off items delivered, and printed out his customers receipts. Do you need to read and write for your job? I asked him. No, he said, thats not important. What is important? I asked. Talking he said. Good talkers always do well.
Compared to reading and writing, we hardly focus on that at all.

There remains, of course, a relatively small group of people, in certain professions, populations and parts of society, for whom written literacy is important, and will clearly remain so for the foreseeable future. But that group is quite tiny relative to the number of people on the planet. And, importantly, it no longer creates two classes, given that non-readers-and-writers have increasingly universal access to other communication tools. It may be no different than those who can and cant speak a foreign languagethere are many other ways to access the same material.
What to do?
What does this mean for school? It probably means, for one thing, that (again as strange as it sounds) we should stop focusing on literacy, as in reading and writing (or, worse, literaciesan oxymoron), and focus, rather, on communication of ideas. How do we put ideas out there, clearly and succinctly, for other people, and how do we take them in? This is what we want our students to be good at, whatever medium they use. Increasingly, people with things (even sophisticated things) to say, and intellectual arguments to make, are choosing non-written media. They are putting their thoughts and ideas into video (and other media, such as serious games) rather than writing,
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and sharing them on sites such as ted.com, bigthink.com, and even YouTube. Today, when searching, if one does not perform a separate video search in addition to a Google search, one misses vital information. (This despite the fact that the top YouTubes do come up in a Google search.) What might one miss? Speeches and presentations by Nobel prize winners or key business executives, for example. Even a YouTube search is no longer enough. One needs to use a dedicated engine, such as blinkx.com, fooooo.com, truveo.com, pixsy.com, vizhole.com, that searches multiple video sites. (This is only temporary. Search will soon be integrated across media.)
Use your phone

Today, more and more cell phones can retrieve and play videosoon almost all phones will. This puts the 100 million videos on YouTube, Ted.com, Teacher Tube, School Tube, Big Think, Wonderhowto, Ehow, Monkeysee and other useful sites in your pocket, purse or backpack all the timeavailable whenever you want or need them. Because much of this new video is talking heads, it works surprisingly well on the small screenmuch better, in fact, than large volumes of text. As we become increasingly able to take and send (to one individual or a few) and upload (to many or the world) from our personal devices, why would we ever choose to send a written message? (Of course there are reasons for some people. But Im talking about most people.)
The anthropology of Youtube

One person who has been carefully observing YouTube is anthropologist and professor Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University. He has certainly opened my eyes, via his YouTubes and talks (many of which can be found, of course, on YouTube) to short videos true meaning and power. I strongly recommend everyone search for, and look at, his work. What Wesch has principally helped me understand is the extent to which short video is a new way perhaps the new wayto communicate, to share ideas, opinions, emotions, humor, parody with people around the world.
Scale
One of the most amazing thing about YouTube is how easily it scales from tiny to enormous audiences. One can aim to reach only a few people (Wesch estimates that a high percentage of the videos on YouTube are designed for, and reach, under 100 people), but one can also aim for, and reach, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. There are particular waysdocumented by Wesch and his studentsof going about creating viral videos that will reach numbers in the higher ranges. Before the advent of YouTube, Weschs own anthropological ideas might have reached hundreds of people (i.e. his students), and perhaps several thousand in his lifetime. His books might have reached tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thou42

Backup education?
sands if successful. But his YouTubes can, and already have, reached an audience of millions. Some YouTubes (e.g. certain songs and dances) move incredibly rapidly around the world, engendering version after version, parody after parodynot just imitation, but reinterpretation and commentary. There are already YouTubes with over one billion views. Someday soon there will be a videoperhaps a phenomenal soccer play mashed up with a highly popular songthat will be seen by almost everyone on the planet. Many people, including a growing number of teachers and intellectuals, have already decided they can reach people better with their ideas (or reach different people) through short videos on sites like Big Think and TED than through print.
Issues with YouTube

But, of course, there are issues. Mostly they involve sorting out the good and worthwhile from the bad and to be avoided. Just as with all other media, there are lowbrow YouTubes, some with objectionable images and foul language. Few want this to become the main use of the medium, so people are quickly working out ways of automatically identifying adult material, in order to be able to label it, and flag it before one can see it, so that people can make appropriate choices. Already, today, many adult YouTubes are preceded by a disclaimer about their content. As writer Clay Shirky points out, YouTube does not have a content problem, but rather a filter problem. The fact that we have not yet created very good automated filters that can evaluate a video by its content, or even by the words in it, is a major issue. But there are a lot of very smart people working hard on this problem, and useful, continuously improving solutions will, no doubt, soon emerge.
Making the tradeoffs correctly

There is a lot of YouTube that is just one not-so-interesting person talking (typically, to less than 100 watchers.) And, as we just noted, YouTube has some objectionable material, both visual and spoken (just like all our media in a free society.) Does this justify banning YouTube in our schools? To answer this question one must also look at those negatives against the positives of YouTube for learning, and evaluate the tradeoffs. Among the positives of YouTube i.e. its learning benefitsare: An immense number of teaching videos, where someone who knows something teaches it to others. These have been created by teachers, by people in various jobs and professions, and by students and other young people. Topics range from Using Web 2.0 to Teach Languages to Students Teaching Students Math. It would be foolish to ignore the medium of video as a powerful learning tool for todays youth. It is, in fact, mostly how they learn on their own, and one can, actually, learn entire new professions (such as how to be an online artisty or developer) this way.
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A wealth of useful explanatory video on practically EVERY subject. A psychology teacher recently wondered if there were any videos of Freuds theories of the mindthere were, to his surprise, many. Video-based learning matches many (if not most) students preference. Todays young people generally prefer video to reading as a way of learning. The job of finding good, useful video can be a part of students learning. The same psychology teacher mentioned above decided to give points for the best videos found by students, rather than searching for them himself. He had useful responses within 10 minutes of posting the request, and found it more useful to have the students be the-quality filters- than himself. The ability for students to see, hear, and learn from, top experts in any field. This increasingly includes Nobel Prize winners, top politicians, award-winning journalists, Supreme Court justices, etc. The ability for students to research and view the huge and growing number of primary-source, historical videos available, such as the anti-Nazi propaganda films made by Walt Disney during WW II. The ability for teachers to mentor, coach and guide students through the process of viewing and reviewing YouTube videos, and to help students separate out what is true and useful from what is merely there. Many school districts and educators never even make the tradeoffs before heading straight to a ban. The truth is the positives of video sites for education far outweigh its negatives (and, in addition, those negatives can be addressed through other means than bans, such as requiring students to turn off their computers if something inappropriate shows up on the screen.) To use only the negatives to justify banning YouTube and other video sites (except, of course, for porn sites) is to disregard the huge benefits that these sites bring for student learning.
Using video to share teachers successes

Ironically there is another group for whom YouTube-style video offers a fantastic potential solution, and that is teachers. For a variety of reasonsmostly generationalteachers typically do a very poor job of sharing their successful approaches, lessons, and pedagogies. This slows down tremendously the process of learning from each other. Time and again teachers have shared with me great stories about good things they have donethings that it would be really helpful for other teachers to hear. Because writing (especially writing well for others) is such an effort, these stories are almost never documented in written form and posted (and thus made available to others via search.) But all it would take to make this material available is for the teacher (or their student) to point a video camera (or cell phone) at themselves and talk for thirty seconds, telling the same story they told me. They could then either upload that story as is, or if they chose, they could augment the story with comments from students, and even a shot of
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Why YouTube matters
the class if appropriate. (Its even becoming childs play to fuzz out faces if necessary.) The entire process of making and uploading such a sharing video, once one had a bit of experience, would take less than five minutes, and it could, potentially, reach, and influence, millions of teachers around the world. There are some teachers who are already doing thisthere are some shared videos by teachers on using Web 2.0, for example. But this is something that all teachersincluding college teachersshould be (and, in the future, I predict, will be) doing.
Speeding it up
One might, of course, ask the question: Where will the time come from for people to watch all these videos and communicate in these ways?Some of it will certainly come from reading less, but, for many young people, it will come from the substitution of watching videos for watching broadcast TV. I have talked with teenagers who already watch no TV at allbut lots of YouTube. As online video expands to include things previously findable only on the networks, as it is already doing on Hulu, that substitution will only increase. And, it turns out, we can also watch it faster. With tools that are very likely already on your computer, much video can be watched at fast-forward speeds, without changing the pitch of the voices. These incredibly useful tools are, for some reason, not highlighted, but buried deep within Microsoft Windows Media Player. To try them, when you are watching any video file in the Windows Media Player, hit Ctrl-Shift-G to speed the video up, Ctrl-Shift-S to slow it down, and Ctrl-Shift-N to go back to normal. You can also find a slider control for more precise adjustment (Right click to access the menus.) A speedup of about 1.4 to 2x faster seems to work best for video. It is also possible to slow any videos down for those whose comprehension is less good, or for understanding people speaking quickly or with accents. I have been arguing for years that these controls should be built into all video players, and hopefully, they, and other useful tools, will soon appear in other places. Sadly, they still do not exist on YouTubebut one can always, using a tool (such as RiverDeep) capture the online video as an avi or wmv file play it through the Widows Media Player.
The bottom line: media are changing

Mainstream media do not last foreverthey get supplanted whenever it is deemed better by users to do so. A thousand years ago writing supplanted memory, over Socrates bitter objections. Today, a new and important change is taking place. In only a few decades, television and cell phones have penetrated far further around the globe than the written word has in a millennium. YouTube, and short video in general, has, in a very short time, become a key medium for sharing and finding more and more sophisticated information of all kinds.
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No oneleast of all meexpects writing and reading to disappear any time soon, particularly among the intellectual classes. But as technology advances, other media are likely to take over the mainstream. This may be a change, but since little or no information is lost, it is hard to justify labeling it a bad one. Rather, it is only the march of progress, as information and communication changes forms (i.e. clothing) to suit the current world. Because, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message, this will bring other changes as well, to which we should remain alert. I would expect that in the coming years, large numbers of additional video sites (along with other, more interactive forms) will blossom, containing most or all of the kinds of useful information that is now available mostly (or entirely) in print. In the education world, this will likely include student-created, teacher-reviewed curriculum-related videos and presentations that are available to all, and whose breadth and quality rapidly improves with time. Educators who are still willing to deny or restrict their students access to a major communications mediumone that is filled with highly relevant educational information (and is already, although still in its infancy, embraced and used by many top thinkers to spread their ideas)now fall squarely into that shrinking camp of people who think that the only way to protect their students from the future is to deny it to them. That seems pretty counter-educational to me.
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Recommended reading
Recommended readings
Marc Prensky
Books
Digital Game Based Learning, Paragon House, 2007 Paragon House; 2007 Dont Bother Me MomIm Learning!, Paragon Press, 2007. Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning, Corwin Press, 2010.
Articles to download for Marcs website (www.marcprensky.com/writing):

Digital Natives, Digital ImmigrantsA new way to look at ourselves and our kids. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20 Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part2.pdf Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part II: do they really think differently? Neuroscience Says Yes. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20 Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part2.pdf The iPad is Coming to SchoolsOr is it? -- To get past the barriers, you need the whole product (in Educational Technology, 2010). http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-TheiPadIsComing-orIsIt-EdTech2010-02.pdf Digital Wisdom Moving beyond Natives and Inmigrants (in Innovate, Feb-Mar 2009) http://www.innovateonline.info/pdf/vol5_issue3/H._Sapiens_Digital-__From_ Digital_Immigrants_and_Digital_Natives_to_Digital_Wisdom.pdf
Richard Gerver
Creating Tomorrows Schools Today: Education, - Our Children - Their Futures, Continuum, 2010.
Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis Jonhson

Disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. McGraw Hill, 2008.
Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica

The element, How finding your passion changes everything, Viking Adult, 2009.
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