Current methods of education must change to accommodate the needs of the ‘digital native’ generation.
Introduction
The risk of failing a whole generation of students has concerned the field of education widely due to the idea of revolution against the old-fashioned educational models (Prensky 2001: p.6), it was advocated by commentators on pedagogy regardless to the high-technology as a product of the rapid changing world. As opposite to the predecessors, Prensky (2001) suggested that high technology has involved entirely in the lives of the generation born after 1980. Furthermore, such experience is likely to restructure their means of thinking, and this kind of people is then titled the ‘Digital native’. In this essay, it aims to evaluate a variety of potential disputes and investigate whether changes are compulsory to make for accommodating the needs of the ‘New’ students.
Social researchers Howe and Strauss (2000), regarded digital natives as optimistic, team-oriented achievers who are talented with technology, which was supported by Prensky (2001) that people in this generation have been surrounded by and using devices such as computers, videogames, mobile phones and all the other tools of the digital age, and yet, he also emphasized that these experiences have developed them to become active experiential learners and proficient in multi-tasking, for example, they are used to listen to music, talk on mobile phones and use computers simultaneously, as a result, immediate changes of the teaching methods in schools have therefore come to be crucial while all these are making them different from the older generations. However, arguments against the claims have come straight forward and disapproved them as undertheorized and lack a sound empirical basis (Bennett et al. 2008: p.776). Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans (2001) indicated that there is yet no substantial evidence supporting skills like multitasking is an exclusive ability of digital natives, and such...