Digital Native?

1. Do you consider yourself a digital native, immigrant, or even alien? Why?

I consider myself a digital immigrant with a pretty good digital accent. I was young enough when the digital revolution began that I was able to adapt to the technological advances of the time and they in turn influenced me. Not only did I adjust well to the technological advances of my time but I have also made an effort to learn about technology as it has developed.

While many of my friends hesitated to get involved with blogger, facebook or photoshop, I worked at teaching myself how to navigate these different forms of technology. However, I shouldn't take all the credit when it comes to my natural "digital accent" because of a lot my willingness to engage in these different forms of technology comes from the influence of my Korean ESL students and the friends that I made while teaching ESL in Korea.

2. What experiences have you had with technology in the classroom either as a teacher or learner? Compare high school technology to college technology. Did it improve your learning experience?
I have experienced technology as both a teacher and a student. In my undergraduate program is where I first began to use email and then in my graduate work I received almost of my reading through the gradschool's website.

However, I learned the most about technology in the classroom from my students in Korea. I taught English as a Second Language at a Korean university for almost three years. In my opinion, the average Korean's technological literacy is much higher than the typical American's technological literacy. My students' overall knowledge and comfortability with computers inspired me to learn more as well as use technology more in class.

My students would always use hotmail chat to complete their assignments and in their presentations always used various forms of technology. I also used technologies like powerpoint, mp3 players and video in my classes in the past but after reading these articles I have an even greater understanding of how important it is to use technology in classes in particularly when working with such a highly digital group of people like Koreans.

3. Have these articles changed your mind about the use of technology in your future classroom? How might you incorporate it?
Even though I feel I am somewhat comfortable working in a "Digital Native" setting, I do feel that I don't always have the level of appreciation for "these new skills that the Natives have acquired and perfected through years of interaction and practice." I truly gained a greater understanding of the skill-sets that my students are coming from through this article. And even if I don't design everything in a computer game format, I think I have a greater understanding of how I need to design class content.

I found Prensky's story about the professors that wanted to write the program like a graduate class particularly fascinating. It was the perfect analogy for the difference between the digital immigrant and the digital native. "The professors insisted that the learners do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.) They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional pedagogical language of “learning objectives,” “mastery”, etc. (e.g. “in this exercise you will learn…”); our goal was to completely eliminate any language that even smacked of education."

Interestingly, I can understand both parties. I can understand the desire for deliberate instruction and pedagogical language but I also know almost intuitively that the computer game model will be more effective. Perhaps this shows that I straddle both the Digital Native world and the Digital Immigrant world.