This assignment has been quite a trying one for me due to the fact that I am a digital immigrant. For those of you who are not familiar "Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives," Marc Prensky (2001) employs an analogy of native speakers and immigrants to describe the generation gap separating today's students (the "Digital Natives") from their teachers (the "Digital Immigrants").
For me to set down and simple post a comment in my blog it takes me about 15 minutes to figure out why I can't log into my blog without it coming up in Japanese ever time, due to the fact that I live in Japan. Because I can't remember what I did the time before to correct this I have to go through the pain staking steps of trouble shooting the site. I have now figured out that if I log in through google.com in English that I do not have to go through the rest of my prior hassles.
I then can not remember where I go to start a new posting and click every possible link until it brings me to the home page that I need to be at. This could be corrected by simpling logging in through the blogger site but I always go back to my save URL in the conference section of the OMDE classroom.
All the while I am thinking about what a luxury it must be to be a digital native and not have to go through this every time you log into a new world online! I am glad that I have had to go through all of these growing pains so to speak because it is a wonderful new world online that I have yet to enjoy because of my fear of navigation!
Prensky, Marc (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon. Vol 9(5). www.marcprensky.com/writing/
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Kim,
ReplyDeleteI understand your frustration with it wanting to take you to a default language! I had this same problem when I was living in Italy... only Italy has far more cognates than Japanese so I imagine your situation is even more frustrating!
One suggestion that may help you with similar navigation problems when using a new tool is to try a search on YouTube, TeacherTube, or even Google itself. I've found a lot of tutorials on these sites that have really helped me learn how to complete many assignments-- especially since I use MS Office 2007 and it operates very differently than older versions.
I hope this helps!
Tiffany
What do you know, as soon as I signed-out I found a tutorial on the Blogger homepage. I hope this helps!
ReplyDeleteTiff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb4VPSmKuo
Thank you for the site to help me out!
ReplyDeleteThis is really the difference that I try to make point of in the digital native and immigrant point.
I have a young woman who is 24 that works with me and she is a lot like you. When ever we need to know something or are searching for answers she always just jumps right on the internet and looks it up. This is slowing become the search that I turn to but it definitely still is not the first place I search. Mainly because I become frustrated with the search due to the fact that I have no idea what I am doing when I search.
I would find our library science course much more useful if we added to the curriculum the fact that students need to know these types of search situations, not just how to search for scholarly information.
Steph
That's a great point, but likely overlooked. Have you made the suggestion? I bet they could easily add that into the course!
ReplyDeleteTiff
I have been trying to figure out what my login is for days and finally figured it out today. Apparently I have 3 different logins for different blogs that I deal with (the highlight is turkeybaby.blogspot.com if you are bored)
ReplyDeleteBTW, I teach "digital natives" and I am not always impressed with their computer abilities. I think that the assumption that they are all hardwired for this stuff is a bit premature, but it is coming fast. The ones I worry about are the students that come to the US from developing countries and don't have the billion hours of computer and game time under their belts. I also worry if this will create another class gap in performance...
Tiffany and Hans,
ReplyDeleteI realy like what Hans says about digital natives and "not(being) always impressed with their computer abilities". You are so right, they may have the quick fingers on iphones or computers and can download, upload and open 10 sites at the same time, but they have a very hard time doing serious research and weeding through information. They may be digital natives in their tech social life but immigrant in their other skills. It would be interesting to find the connecting moment when both digital natives and immigrants come to the same academic result.