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The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past.

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. 

our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language

Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today's learners are different.

So what should happen?  Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? 

methodology

learn to communicate in the language and style of their students

it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other thing

kinds of content

As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.

Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully.  My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.

"Why not make the learning into a video game!

But while the game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent, creating the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors, who were used to teaching courses that started with "Lesson 1 – the Interface."  We asked them instead to create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors had made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.)   They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional pedagogical language of "learning objectives," "mastery", etc. (e.g. "in this exercise you will learn"); our goal was to completely eliminate any language that even smacked of education.

large mind-shift required

We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.