Someone's been collecting some research.
The Problem
with Prensky is a page in the Knowledge Garden, an online forum and
blogging community of the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. The
page contains a moderately lengthy review of the question of whether exposure
to digital technologies actually brings about changes in the brain, and then a
number of comments from members of the garden's community (I don't know how many
of these are by faculty, and how many by students, not that it matters). There's a general no-nonsense atmosphere
to this page, made clear right from the outset. After asking some basic questions
about Prensky's claims, we read:
There is however very little supportable evidence to
suggest that these differences actually exist. The difficulty of refuting
such claims is that many authors produce documents in both the academic and
popular press expressing opinions that appear compelling (and in fact are supported
by many within the pedagogical industry, but do so without citation to
studies and research.
The relevant literature still seems rather sparse, and the review of the literature
on the page is cursory, but it still seems much more substantial than what Prensky
himself offers.
Go to: Can we every feel at home?,
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old
country