Tag: digitalnatives

Digital Natives and Spaghetti Sauce

Brian wrote about about the EDUCAUSE ELI web seminar on net gen learners , and after reading that post and the great comments, I got to thinking about the overgeneralization of the mythical "Digital Native". Fast forward to this morning's bus ride, where I'm watching Malcom Gladwell's presentation at TED2004. Now, Malcom is the author of The Tipping Point , so I was expecting some discussion of how small changes build up to affect large, even transformative effects. But, he wound up talking about something so much more interesting, and likely more important to my perception of students. Spaghetti sauce. No, really.

Malcom told the story of a friend of his named Howard Moscowitz, who was hired in the 80s by Campbell Soup Company to help revamp the Prego spaghetti sauce. They wanted to come up with the perfect sauce, to gain market share against Ragu. Instead of trying to whip up a bunch of batches of prototype sauces to test on volunteers in order to find the perfect sauce, he identified a series of variables (things like sweetness, saltiness, chunkness, spicyness, etc…) and took the resulting 30+ combinations on the road. He gatherred hundreds of volunteers, giving them each 10 small bowls of spaghetti with a preselected sauce variety on top. He then had the volunteers rate the sauce on a plain old Likert scale, winding up with reams of data that didn't look like it made any sense. Until he started to analyze the relationships between variables.

Howard found that there isn't one perfect sauce. There are three. Something like "Regular", "Spicy" and "Extra Chunky". (the names were different, but you get the idea) Seems pretty obvious now, but at the time, everyone was looking to design a single perfect sauce, inspired by a typical Italian sauce (which was perceived by all as the Ultimate Spaghetti Sauce, of course). In all of the focus groups held over the previous 2 or 3 decades, not a single volunteer mentioned that they liked "Extra Chunky" sauce. They all said that they would prefer the thin Italian sauce. Yet, after analyzing his data, Howard could see that 33% of people prefer "Extra Chunky" with the remainder split between the other two varieties.

This tells me a few things that are actually relevant to my perception of students in general, and "Digital Natives" in particular.

  1. There is variabilty in preferences (whether in spaghetti sauces so learning styles) and that understanding that variation is not only expected but necessary for success.
  2. People don't know what they want. They might say they would prefer the Italian sauce, or pervasive ubiquitous online communication. But individuals either have difficulty identifying and communicating their actual preferences, or they may be truly unaware of them (whether as a result of cultural pressure or other factors).
  3. We need to better understand the variables that affect our interactions with students. It's not enough to say that students are "Digital Natives" or "Net Genners". There is no One True Student. Individuals vary by learning style, experience/comfort with various strategies (online and offline), socioeconomic status, maturity, locus of control, etc… and we need to identify common clusters of these variables and develop strategies to support these groups (and the individuals that compose them).

We're already doing much to try to address these variables (blended learning to help students that have to work 30 hour weeks to access their courses when and where they can, etc…) but I think it would be much more productive to focus on these variables rather than brandishing labels like "Digital Natives" and "Net Genners"

Brian wrote about about the EDUCAUSE ELI web seminar on net gen learners , and after reading that post and the great comments, I got to thinking about the overgeneralization of the mythical "Digital Native". Fast forward to this morning's bus ride, where I'm watching Malcom Gladwell's presentation at TED2004. Now, Malcom is the author of The Tipping Point , so I was expecting some discussion of how small changes build up to affect large, even transformative effects. But, he wound up talking about something so much more interesting, and likely more important to my perception of students. Spaghetti sauce. No, really.

Malcom told the story of a friend of his named Howard Moscowitz, who was hired in the 80s by Campbell Soup Company to help revamp the Prego spaghetti sauce. They wanted to come up with the perfect sauce, to gain market share against Ragu. Instead of trying to whip up a bunch of batches of prototype sauces to test on volunteers in order to find the perfect sauce, he identified a series of variables (things like sweetness, saltiness, chunkness, spicyness, etc…) and took the resulting 30+ combinations on the road. He gatherred hundreds of volunteers, giving them each 10 small bowls of spaghetti with a preselected sauce variety on top. He then had the volunteers rate the sauce on a plain old Likert scale, winding up with reams of data that didn't look like it made any sense. Until he started to analyze the relationships between variables.

Howard found that there isn't one perfect sauce. There are three. Something like "Regular", "Spicy" and "Extra Chunky". (the names were different, but you get the idea) Seems pretty obvious now, but at the time, everyone was looking to design a single perfect sauce, inspired by a typical Italian sauce (which was perceived by all as the Ultimate Spaghetti Sauce, of course). In all of the focus groups held over the previous 2 or 3 decades, not a single volunteer mentioned that they liked "Extra Chunky" sauce. They all said that they would prefer the thin Italian sauce. Yet, after analyzing his data, Howard could see that 33% of people prefer "Extra Chunky" with the remainder split between the other two varieties.

This tells me a few things that are actually relevant to my perception of students in general, and "Digital Natives" in particular.

  1. There is variabilty in preferences (whether in spaghetti sauces so learning styles) and that understanding that variation is not only expected but necessary for success.
  2. People don't know what they want. They might say they would prefer the Italian sauce, or pervasive ubiquitous online communication. But individuals either have difficulty identifying and communicating their actual preferences, or they may be truly unaware of them (whether as a result of cultural pressure or other factors).
  3. We need to better understand the variables that affect our interactions with students. It's not enough to say that students are "Digital Natives" or "Net Genners". There is no One True Student. Individuals vary by learning style, experience/comfort with various strategies (online and offline), socioeconomic status, maturity, locus of control, etc… and we need to identify common clusters of these variables and develop strategies to support these groups (and the individuals that compose them).

We're already doing much to try to address these variables (blended learning to help students that have to work 30 hour weeks to access their courses when and where they can, etc…) but I think it would be much more productive to focus on these variables rather than brandishing labels like "Digital Natives" and "Net Genners"

Rob Wall on the Myth of Digital Natives

Rob Wall just posted a great blog entry about the myth of the “digital natives” – he (rightly) says:

People are learning in the same way that we always have – mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work.

I agree, that the nature of learning in and of itself has not changed. We learn in roughly the same way as cavedwellers did millennia ago. (“how catch deer? thog show.”) What has changed is the nature of communication, for some of the students. Their reach has been amplified by pervasive, interactive, and global media. The scale and scope of their community has changed such that while they are learning mostly from each other, the number of individuals they can potentially learn from is much greater than it was for us “immigrants”.

The use of the term “digital natives” is misleading. I’m as “native” as possible. I cut my teeth decades ago (at the age of 12) on the Vic-20, then the C-64, C-128, Amiga 1000, Macintosh II, etc… (anyone remember COMPUTE! Magazine? Before the Internet, that’s how we communicated, and we liked it)

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing something with a computer. But that’s not what is changing things. The real agent of change isn’t familiarity/expertise with computers or applications. It’s not about computers. They are just an enabling tool. While I grew up with computers, I did not grow up with the Internet. I spent a lot of time on the precursers (BBS, FidoNet, and many false starts which I’ve since forgotten), but the real agent of change isn’t hardware, it’s the always-on, global social network of individuals and communities that is enabled by that hardware.

I think the real paradigm shift is with the “internet natives” – people who just assume they have access to their peers at any time, from any location. And they assume they have instant access to any information or communication resource they could need, at any time, from any location. This, in effect, amplifies the effect of things like connectivism, where an individual’s “knowledge” is spread across a network – if you have access to a better/faster/bigger/smarter network, your effective knowledge (or at least the data and processes to provide that knowledge) is greater.

Also, I don’t think there needs to be a distinction between “internet natives” and “internet immigrants”. While I am most certainly an “internet immigrant” – in that I wasn’t exposed to the Internet until I was 18 (and it wasn’t the WWW, sonny!) I’ve incorporated the ‘net in such a way that it’s just a reflex. It’s built-in now. Perhaps something more useful than a native/immigrant distinction (which is arbitrarily and artificially divisive) would be an understanding that there is a spectrum of incorporation of the network into the individual.

Rob Wall just posted a great blog entry about the myth of the “digital natives” – he (rightly) says:

People are learning in the same way that we always have – mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work.

I agree, that the nature of learning in and of itself has not changed. We learn in roughly the same way as cavedwellers did millennia ago. (“how catch deer? thog show.”) What has changed is the nature of communication, for some of the students. Their reach has been amplified by pervasive, interactive, and global media. The scale and scope of their community has changed such that while they are learning mostly from each other, the number of individuals they can potentially learn from is much greater than it was for us “immigrants”.

The use of the term “digital natives” is misleading. I’m as “native” as possible. I cut my teeth decades ago (at the age of 12) on the Vic-20, then the C-64, C-128, Amiga 1000, Macintosh II, etc… (anyone remember COMPUTE! Magazine? Before the Internet, that’s how we communicated, and we liked it)

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing something with a computer. But that’s not what is changing things. The real agent of change isn’t familiarity/expertise with computers or applications. It’s not about computers. They are just an enabling tool. While I grew up with computers, I did not grow up with the Internet. I spent a lot of time on the precursers (BBS, FidoNet, and many false starts which I’ve since forgotten), but the real agent of change isn’t hardware, it’s the always-on, global social network of individuals and communities that is enabled by that hardware.

I think the real paradigm shift is with the “internet natives” – people who just assume they have access to their peers at any time, from any location. And they assume they have instant access to any information or communication resource they could need, at any time, from any location. This, in effect, amplifies the effect of things like connectivism, where an individual’s “knowledge” is spread across a network – if you have access to a better/faster/bigger/smarter network, your effective knowledge (or at least the data and processes to provide that knowledge) is greater.

Also, I don’t think there needs to be a distinction between “internet natives” and “internet immigrants”. While I am most certainly an “internet immigrant” – in that I wasn’t exposed to the Internet until I was 18 (and it wasn’t the WWW, sonny!) I’ve incorporated the ‘net in such a way that it’s just a reflex. It’s built-in now. Perhaps something more useful than a native/immigrant distinction (which is arbitrarily and artificially divisive) would be an understanding that there is a spectrum of incorporation of the network into the individual.