Someone once said that management gurus are the commissars of capitalism: whatever the differences in approach, whatever nuance they press on the gimmick-laden world of business improvement, they all seek ultimately to further the interests of the capitalistic economy.

     It would be difficult to paint a similarly doctrinaire picture of the jumble of pundits that inhabits the intersection of ICT and education. While they would all agree that their aim is to make the human learning experience a better one, they draw their inspiration from across the political, social and educational spectra. They are as likely to be de-schoolers as advocates for compulsory schooling, they can be politically left or right, or neither, they might be religious or atheistic, scientific or artistic, and so on. They can arise, in other words, out of any slice of our mixed up, cacophonous humanity.

     Like all gurus, their messages tend to be expressed in simple terms, even when underlaid by careful research and deep thinking. But whatever the starting point of these free thinkers, and however simple their views are expressed, their pronouncements usually have enough of a hint of truth in them to catch the imagination and provoke debate. That is what makes them gurus.

     One such is Marc Prensky: at various times a teacher, musician, actor, corporate strategist, entrepreneur and self-styled ICT visionary. He popularized the now familiar dichotomy between Digital Native and Digital Immigrant. Young people (the natives) simply accept the new technologies as part of the social, technological and cultural landscape in which they exist. Since they have never known a time when ICT was not pervasive, they engage with and deploy these technologies as a natural element of their daily lives. Older people (the immigrants), on the other hand, have grown up alongside the emergence and proliferation of the new technologies. Since they therefore remember a time before ICT was omnipresent, their acceptance of the new technologies is different in kind. In Prensky’s terms, they ‘speak technology’ with a different accent.

     Any of us can come up with examples at an anecdotal level to demonstrate the variations in ‘accent’. The Digital Immigrant might print a piece of text to edit it off-line, print out an email for filing, phone to check that an email has arrived. The Digital Native prefers to multi-task, will eschew text for graphics, works best when networked, and is comfortable with non-sequential narrative.  When described in this way, it is difficult not to admit that Prensky’s argument chimes, at least in part, with our own perceptions of the differences between the generations in the way each copes with ICT.

     He goes further, however, by speculating that the minds of young people today are ‘wired’ differently to those of their elders (he acknowledges the metaphor here, but claims it has a basis in neurological reality). The different range of experiences they encounter have structured their brains to reflect those experiences, and this transformation in the brain (known as neuroplasticity) continues to occur throughout life.

     Following this, he takes a leap of imagination by suggesting that most, if not all, teaching could be done through the use of computer games. He argues that the Digital Natives “grew up on the ‘twitch speed’ of video games and MTV” and that the measured and deliberate pace of traditional school teaching therefore no longer meets their needs.

     As with most such guru-like pronouncements, the inherent simplicity of the message is both its strength and its weakness. An education system, a school or a teacher that takes no notice of the changing realities faced by today’s young people is simply failing in their responsibilities. But the proposition that all learning could be undertaken through computer games is irrational, not least because his own basic proposition is necessarily a simplification of reality. To set up a simple polarity for the sake of argument is one thing; to then use that simplification to typify the whole population is specious. Prensky’s false dichotomy assumes that  the ‘old way of learning’ is a single homogenous lump that is incapable of coping with the new paradigm of pervasive digital technology. To discard casually all that has gone before in this way would be to dispense with the intricate tangle of teaching and learning methodologies that have evolved over the generations, many of which are more than capable, with imagination and sensitivity on the  part of teachers everywhere, of meeting the multifarious needs of our young people today. Where needs cannot be met through existing methods, a new pedagogy will have to arise to meet the needs, something long recognised. I sincerely believe that most adults do underestimate the potential of computer gaming. It has a serious and viable place in education, but to try to fill the whole pedagogical void with computer games would be bizarre.

     Young people today are as complex in their approach to life, as varied in their needs, aspirations, fears, hopes and attitudes as any previous generation. Prensky is right to point up how they differ from their antecedents, how that ‘twitch speed’ means that they deserve to be treated appropriately; but to argue that all young people are in this multi-tasking, hypermedia-based mode at all times would be an absurd generalisation. Just because they can operate in this way does not mean that they have to live according to the script at all times. Even young people like to slip back into ‘pre-twitch’ mode, to daydream, to read a book in peace, to hook into a single, uncomplicated stream of information whether viewed, heard or read. Our understanding of the nature of learning is more than capable of dealing with the condition of young people today – although Prensky is right to press teachers to recognise these changes and to alter their approaches accordingly.

     Prensky, of course, is one of those Pioneers himself – perhaps his pioneering instinct has somewhat got the better of him.