Week 8 - Website Analysis 4

Website 4

Website 4 is an article from a well known national newspaper. It deals with a mother of a 15 year old about to take his GCSE’s, and her inability to connect with the way he works and revises. This insightful article is well thought out and references Prensky directly. You find a sense of trust in the site not only because it is attached to an accredited newspaper, but also because she brings in other points of view and experts in the field to find out more, you feel that she is on a personal journey.

She questions some of the issues that Prensky has brought up, when talking about the advantages of revising online (such as emailing experts, the amount of information, networking with peers) she writes, “I can see that that broadens his knowledge, but does it deepen it?” She also supports Prensky’s view of the inherent differences in the way that digital natives and digital immigrants work and learn. Digital natives, “like receiving information quickly from multiple media sources.”

She deals with a lot of issues surrounding digital immigration, such as how teenagers read and process information, however, she is guilty, like Prensky of generalizing, “Today's teenagers have an assumed ownership of technology”. She ignores the digital divide and makes an assumption that all children today are technophiles. This, perhaps, would have confused matters though in an otherwise clear article. Bringing in the digital divide for an article not meant for media academics, but for the educated middle class, may have been too much information and so the generalization may have helped in that way?

The article is written in a witty and straightforward way, dealing with complicated issues in a simple yet intelligible way. This seems to be a good introduction to Prensky’s theories.