Digital Native or Immigrant?

I feel I am a digital immigrant. I remember my first year of college, when instant messaging became popular, and I was having conversations with people down the hall of my dorm on IM. I thought this was ridiculous and I imagined the extreme – will we all become totally antisocial and too lazy to communicate through anything but technology? Will we all become inane, robotic, digital geeks, with our faces glued to screens most of the day? But actually, I now have a hard time seeing myself living without it. I read the news online, use Skype to talk to friends far away, check my e-mail sometimes several times a day, and use the internet to find out about anything and everything I want to know—movies, books, facts, cultural events, travel, etc. One thing that makes me nothing near a digital native is that I just don’t understand the gaming culture. I am totally uninterested in even trying to understand it, but it looks like I might have to anyway. And it might turn out more interesting than I think…I hope.

“Today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.” As Prensky delved deeper and deeper into this thought, I started to think about how students of my generation “thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.” I will have to be a more entertaining, dynamic, experiential teacher because of this, and that’s fine with me because I relate to it. I don’t have as much patience as people of my parents’ generation have, for instance, for reading through instruction manuals and encyclopedias. When I wonder about something, I want to find out right away --I have little patience when I have to wait for instructions, materials, or information. And whatever it is, it has to be interesting and entertaining.

Prensky also says that “[students] have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic and tell-test instruction.” Prensky point here made me most uncomfortable in that I feel that this will create the divide between me and my students and I will really have to work to bridge it. It makes me nervous to think that students’ brains develop differently because of their constant interactions with technology.

Overall, I think that technology enriched my educational experience as a high school student and even more as a college student. The Internet gave me access to such an abundance of information and this new phenomenon was exciting for me as a high school student. Later, as a college student, I became more active in my search for knowledge. It was so easy to get the information and find the books and articles I needed in the library and on the web, so I became trained, over time, to remember to look things up more actively and more often. Now, it’s almost become an obsession—I have to know things as soon as I wonder about them and it has become a hobby to find out multiple opinions about issues and events. I know more facts and I know more about what's going on around the world now than I ever imagined as a high school student reading the Oregonian.

I think I will definitely incorporate blogs and Internet searches for projects and videos and visuals into my classroom. I think blogs are a great place for students to convene with their thoughts and share information with each other. I do like the idea of using games to learn language as well, but I will have to warm up more to this idea in the future, I think. I am very much worried about how or if technology will effect our social interactions negatively. At the moment, I much prefer face to face interactive games to computer games.