Teaching & learning as nouns & verbs

In Today's Campus, Marc Prensky thinks about the active learning style that's more effective with today's traditional college age students using the analogy of parts of speech. A couple of quotes:

Digital immigrants view digital technology as a series of tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Flash. The tools can be used to get various things done. Each can be mastered (and taught) individually. In fact, you may right now be offering a “course” in any one of them, as does TV’s “Video Professor.”

Put in other terms, our professors who are digital immigrants see the technology as a series of “programs” or “things” or – in linguistic terms – Nouns.

Today’s students, if they are “native speakers” of digital technology view it in a very different way. They see technology as the means of getting things done: of communicating, of sharing, of presenting, etc.

In linguistic terms our students see technology as Verbs.

And now, for the rest of the story...