Kenton Smith

Review of Literature

Students today have grown up with technology as an integral part of their life with over 10,000 hours playing video games, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV, over 500,000 commercials seen all before college (Prensky, 2001, p.1). They crave interactivity, but many times their learning environments can’t or don’t compete with their living environments. Researchers suggest that the extended focus on interactive, digital entertainment (in combination with a preference for fast-paced television) has created a strong preference for these styles of interaction and presentation. As a result, they are concerned that students may regard conventional methods of “non-interactive, show-and-tell” instruction as extremely boring and possibly even incompatible with the needs of a brain prepared to respond to various stimuli and a “different” way of presenting information (Prensky, 2001).

Are educators, arguably agents of change within districts, dialed into this reality? Have they resigned themselves to complacency with certain approaches of learning? Are there alternative ways that might be more engaging for students? What about for teachers? Have students’ interests and creativity lost their relevance within instructional environments? If students and teachers lose sight of education as a means to be productive members of society, then our nation’s future could be in serious trouble.

This certainly is more than just a technology or education issue as the ramifications have a global and economic impact as well. That being said, though, a student’s education serves as his/her foundation for the future and that holds significance for the future economy and globalization. If applied to school settings in which students are only using computers infrequently (e.g., once a week), then students competing for jobs and progressing through life, in general, would be at a disadvantage and are not truly being prepared for “real world” environments. Yet, K-12 education still does not have a universal plan to ensure students school environments resemble future work environments. Lankshear & Knobel (2006) support this in their discussion of mindsets when they mention how the world is being changed by people imagining and exploring how using new technologies can make the world (more) different from how it presently is (second mindset), rather than using new technologies to do familiar things in more ˜technologized ways (first mindset) (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006, p. 34).