Digital Status

My first inclination was to consider myself half native and half immigrant to the digital world. However, after really considering the readings and watching the T4 video, I’m inclined to lean more toward being a digital immigrant. I’ll happily adopt pretty much anything that comes my way in terms of mainstream technology, but I will admit that I’m not the first person in line for anything new—I need to see proof that it’s going to make my life easier/faster/better before I take a real interest, and I want to see someone else use it first. In addition (and this is what sealed the deal for me in terms of reconsidering my status as a half immigrant-half native), I was raised for all of my formative years with no Internet, no cell phones, certainly no texting or social networking, and even without call waiting, caller ID, or even (the now totally antiquated) pagers.

There was nothing in my school bag that might distract me from class, other than my lunch or maybe a note from a friend, but as Prensky says in the article Engage me or enrage me, students today “find school much less interesting than the myriad devices they carry in their pockets and backpacks” (p. 60, 2005). They carry with them at all times the ability to access infinite amounts of information, games, photos, music, social networking sites, friends, and websites, meaning that at any time, they can deem class or school too dull to focus on, and can shoot off into a digital world for a little outside stimulation. This is something I can fathom, but never personally experienced during the incredibly formative adolescent years, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to officially designate myself an immigrant.

When it comes to technology and its place in my own education, I see it as a line with a pretty steep slope on a graph: when I started kindergarten in 1980—nothing. Middle school—nothing. And the “technology” in my classrooms in high school consisted of…okay, there wasn’t really any technology to speak of. We didn’t have in-class computers to use, and none of my teachers had computers on their desks. There was a computer lab with word processors and dot-matrix printers that we used for typing class, and the only projector my teachers used was the spray-and-wipe overhead, with the occasional transparency thrown up there for good measure. My English teacher wrote our “daily agenda” on the overhead projector everyday in longhand, and we were required to re-copy it onto a piece of paper and hand it in for credit. Zero technology. Zero creativity. So compared to the children of this generation, 68% of whom are in front of a screen of some sort for two or more hours a day at the age of two (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT2E2F0DmyE, 2007), I am a visitor from another era who has come forward in a time machine and been dropped into a world where the kids are faster, more informed, and more technologically nimble than many of the adults.

Now, college was a totally different world for me, given that my university was only a couple of years old when I started there, and had been outfitted with what was—at the time—cutting edge technology. Please keep in mind that we’re talking late-nineties here, and that by “cutting edge” I mean that we had projectors that flashed the computers up onto screens in each class. We were required to use PowerPoints for all presentations, which consisted of fairly plain backgrounds, text, and a few hyperlinks. I think at the time, this huge leap did play into my overall learning experience, as there was a certain amount of excitement about learning new technologies at the same time I was learning new content. Side by side, these two things merged into a unique learning experience for me, and I think I probably retained some of the information differently—and better—than I might have otherwise. But now, more than ten years after I graduated from college, I’m looking again at new and unknown classroom technology, and I think it absolutely has the potential to enhance what I’m currently learning here at Concordia.

The articles we’ve read have already offered some really important insight for future educators as to our need to find new ways to engage our students. Ultimately, it’s our generation that’s changed the game: we’ve developed, improved, and sped up technology, and we’ve consequently bombarded ever-younger audiences with it. Now that kids come to view this world as the norm, we need to understand and acknowledge that this fast-paced world is all that they know. A world where cartoons and movies aren’t on demand 24/7, where we can’t order things online with the click of a button and have them delivered the next day, a world where musty-smelling cards in really long drawers have to be thumbed through in order to find out where the source of information you need is physically shelved, is as foreign to them as texting my BFF on my own little pocket-sized phone to see if she “wants 2 come over 2 my house & watch videos on youtube” would have been to a twelve-year old me.

This speaks to what is perhaps Prensky’s overarching theme in Digital natives, digital immigrants, and that is that “our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (pg. 1, 2001). To that end, it’s not the students who need to be overhauled, it’s our teaching methods, and I’m kind of excited by the suggestions in the T4 video: podcasts, teaching by cell phone, embracing the connectedness rather than fearing it…these are all good things, and hopefully will bring us one step closer to engaging these new generations of tech-savvy digital learners!