Digital Natives versus BA (Google)

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently? From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol 6, December 2001

Brabazon, T. (2008). BA Google: Graduating to information literacy. Chapter 1 from The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age . Ashgate. Available in Google Books

I would love to hear a debate between Prensky and Brabazon. They seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum in their approach to learning. Prensky wants us to cater to the needs of today's students whose brains, he claims, are physically different as a result of growing up within a digital world. "Digital native" thinking skills include:

• reading visual images as representations of three-dimensional space (representational competence),
  
• multidimensional visual-spatial skills,
  
• mental maps,
  
• “mental paper folding” (i.e. picturing the results of various origami-like folds in your mind without actually doing them),
  
• “inductive discovery” (i.e. making observations, formulating hypotheses and figuring out the rules governing the behavior of a dynamic representation),
  
• “attentional deployment” (such as monitoring multiple locations simultaneously), and
  
• responding faster to expected and unexpected stimuli.

Learning needs of digital natives include:

• interactivity with immediate responses to actions
• multi-tasking
• random-access rather than linear progression
  
• graphics before text
• active learning
  
• connected and instant access
  
• fun, fantasy and quick-payoff world of game-based learning

Prensky acknowledges that somewhere in all of this we also need to put in the refletive and critical thinking aspects of learning but offers no suggestions as to how this will be achieved while we cater for and reinforce all of the learning characteristics that are seemingly opposed to scholarly learning.

Brabazon would surely argue in direct opposition to Prensky that higher education is about scholarly learning: serious, considered, reflective thinking. It's about argument and discussion, research and evaluation of information, critical literacy and negotiation of meaning.

I'm wondering how we can reconcile these two realities, or even if they need to be reconciled?