For those who want to
read the concepts of Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants introduced into the
literature by Marc Prensky about 20 years ago, I am sharing the address of the
article below;
When I first read this
article, I reviewed my own situation and thought about which definition I fit
into and finally decided that I was in the "Digital Citizen with Green
Card" group. As a reason, I did not exactly fit the definition of Digital
Citizens, on the other hand, I was not exactly in the Digital Immigrant group. At
that time, the idea was widespread that it would be sufficient to have the
devices that would provide this opportunity to become a Digital Citizen and
participate in digital media. In fact, most of the researchers were trying to
produce projects for this purpose, for example, MIT's projects to give a $ 100
laptop to each child were one of the most prominent, what happened to these and
similar projects? Years have passed by showing that such projects, which are
made for device ownership, do not yield the desired results, but have we
learned? :-)
The only result of
these attempts has been to increase the profitability of those who produce
these devices. During the COVID-19 epidemic we encountered in March last year,
there was a period in which those who had prepared their teachers and students
and those who were not ready were separated because we could not understand the
situation before and could not act accordingly. Interestingly, we are still in
this period and it seems like it will take a long time again to come across a
plan, schedule and effort about when it will end and how it will end. It seems that nothing will be the same in our
lives. Especially education and training will be affected by this, it is now a
necessity to adapt ourselves to a new system where traditional education /
training environments are "Blended" with online environments. While
those who fit into this environment are Digital Citizens, Digital Slaves are
added to the Digital Immigrants group after COVID-19.
The ability to
own and use digital tools and equipment alone does not make societies the
producers of these environments anymore. The main problem is that societies
with individuals who have the knowledge, skills and attitudes to use these
tools for production will make them "digital owners" and others "digital
slaves" of this age.:-)
Access to
information is no longer a problem, so it's been a long time since I first said
"Knowing is not enough, it is necessary to be able to do this, I apologize
to those who know, we hired Google", In other words, we haven't made much
progress.
If we want to be the
master of new ages or if we do not want to be the passengers of escaped trains,
we must immediately realize the changes and transformations that can raise
individuals who can not only know but can. For example, instead of methods that
emphasize more applications than theory and show the problem at the end of the
chapter, we should switch to new education programs in which theory is learned
over problems related to life. We should aim to gain "Computational
Thinking" skills for all our students by living in these environments. In
Teacher Training, we should definitely gain "TECHNOLOGICAL FORMATION"
in addition to the field knowledge and “PEDAGOGICAL FORMATION”.
While doing these, we
should never forget that "Transformation in education takes time", so
if we can do these without patiently giving up, we can be among the
"Digital Masters" of the coming years :-).
Let's not forget, let
me conclude by saying that Knowledge is power and Knowledge multiplies by
sharing.
Prof. Dr. M. Yaşar
Özden
