Digital Native, Digital Immigrants

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

When reading the articles and watching the video on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, I honestly could not decide which of the two I am. Granted I have played a ton of video games in my life, but I didn’t start playing video games till after high school, because my parents wouldn’t allow me too or buy me a video game console (although I did play at friends houses and stuff so I wasn’t oblivious to how the technology worked). As for computers, I’ve been using them since the first grade, due to a motor skills disability I was taught to type in the first grade (in 1990 that wasn’t the norm as it is today), but even with that long experience on the computer I cannot stand reading things for a long period of time on a computer screen. Sure I’ve watched a ton of television and movies in my day, a lot more that I would like to admit, but I still prefer to play outside, or physically hang out with my friends.

So am I a digital native, or a digital immigrant, is it possible to be both? I know how to use technology and am well versed in their languages and processes, but I love the old ways. When doing research for a paper I use Wikipedia like everyone else, but I still open a book and do it that way. I like to use both methods, I enjoy both worlds, and I tend to walk the line between immigrant and native. I can personally see how someone would learn by playing a video or computer game in things like math and science, but personally I prefer doing it the old way. I am one of the students that Prensky describe that “have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age” (Prensky, 2001). But that isn’t how I would define myself, I can use the technology, but I prefer a world without it, does this make me extremely qualified to teach the natives though?

As a learner in my day, I learned in both ways, native and immigrant. For historical purposes I’ve played games like Civilization, Age of Empires, and Oregon Trail, and they did help me understand history and geography; but I still learned the old way with books and lectures. In math I’ve played the computer games where u have to solve math problems to move on to the next step and have had my arithmetic skills enhanced, but I’ve also learned the immigrant way. Same with science and many other subjects, I’ve used the technology and I’ve used the immigrant way, and I have learned and excelled at both. In college I added a new repertoire to my learning’s and that was computer science, I had literally no idea how these things I’d been using since I was really little worked, and in those classes I fixed that. I learned how a computer works, as well as how to use them effectively, and design WebPages. I believe these classes have set me up pretty well to reach out to the digital natives, because I am not sure I am truly one of them.

For the last year I have worked as an I.A and I have seen teachers use technology to reach students, and I realized that for those students it just worked with them. Students were turning in their assignments on-line, listening to pod casts, playing games, using emails, and using Google to locate information. These students I have interacted with used technology more than I have would ever dreamed they would have in the classroom, and as Prensky pointed it “Children raised with the computer ―think differently from the rest of us” (Prensky, 2001), and it was very apparent. But it worked, the students interacted and retained the knowledge that they were learning digitally. They knew more about computers and their programs than I did, and I’ve been using them longer than they had been alive; but they thought differently because they were fully submerged in this world, while I had one foot in and one foot out. The teachers that I worked with understood this and didn’t fight it, they learned to embrace it, and use it as teaching tool.

These articles as well as my own experiences in school, has completely opened my eyes to using technology in the classroom. When I was a student I always found it rather funny when a teacher would try to relate to my world, but I know they felt it was the best way to get through to me, and in this day and age the way to do is through technology. As Prensky said in his article “Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet” (Prensky, 2001), and as a teacher I plan to embrace that fact. I believe because I am a person who fully understands both worlds, native and immigrant, I will be able to use technology adequately while still teaching students how to do things the old fashion way. I will try to use as much media as possible, but as a social studies professor it will be impossible to completely throw out the immigrant world. Students will still need to be able to read books and newspapers, because it is important for historical purposes to feel how things were done in the period they are studying. But for media it will be easy to use movies, games, internet, podcasts, etc. in the classroom. I believe that the best way to teach my subject will be to have my students walk the line between the native and immigrant as much as possible.