Response to Marc Prensky- DN, NetGen and DI

I have just read the article about Digital Natives or the Net Gen and Digital Immigrants. At first the tone of the article was, in my mind, purposefully argumentative and challenging. I resented the clear-cut distinctions between the DN and DI, yet I understood his purpose.
To answer the question do DNs learn differently, I believe that they do, to an extent. Yes, my nieces and nephews are plugged in all day every day, recieving hundreds of texts daily. That has to impact the way they learn and experience school in general. But the readings, particularly the text in Educause states that the majotity of students find that motivation is the best teacher and that teachers do that the best. The person-to -person and peer-to-peer strategy for learning and teaching has long been a successful model. They like to do rahter than listen and it has been proven that interaction with information has a direct relation to studnet retention.
The second question bates us into the realm of feelings and bites at those of us who have had a "classical" education where the authority of the teacher was assumed and that information was fed rather than gathered by us. Mr. Pensky lays out a series of observations about DNs such as the amount of time spent reading is half of the time they spend in front of the screen, they prefer graphics rather than text, they require information faster as well as responses to information more quickly and they prefer experiential learning by doing rather than being told what to do and how. I feel alarmed at some of the statistics like reading vs screen time and intrigued by the experiential learning preference. Yet I cannot lament the lack of self-reflectiveness in this generation because of the speed of their lives as well as the need for instant gratification of information. Some things, like certain kinds of drawing, take time, and in that time is a measure of control and self-reflection. The time it takes to see, react and then make something is a valuable skill. There are many other applications of a slower pace that should be taught to the DN. Are these concepts radical? Yes and yet they do make sense and should be noted as an educator. Mr. Prensky said something brilliant: which is more difficult, learning new stuff or learning new ways to do old stuff. The marriage of Legacy and Future content is the rub, not whether one should exist and the other disappear, but how to teach them in a way that keeps our children caring about themselves and their world.