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today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.

it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed - and are different from ours - as a result of how they grew up.  But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed.

our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.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 Natives are used to receiving information really fast.  They like to parallel process and multi-task.  They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked.  They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.  They prefer games to "serious" work. 

They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and "tell-test" instruction. 

Often from the Natives' point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience - and then they blame them for not paying attention! 

Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate.  Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the "old country."

As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.  The first involves a major translation and change of methodology; the second involves all that PLUS new content and thinking.  It's not actually clear to me which is harder - "learning new stuff" or "learning new ways to do old stuff."  I suspect it's the latter.  

My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.