Week 2 Post 1- Random thoughts on this week's readings

Plenksy: “The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn – like all immigrants, some better than others – to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past. The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it. Today’s older folk were "socialized" differently from their kids, and are now in the process of learning a new language. And a language learned later in life, scientists tell us, goes into a different part of the brain. “ ----Apparently I’m a Digital Native. It’s helpful to me while reading this to remember that it is written in 2001, so it’s very clearly talking about experiences I went through growing up. I had already graduated college by then, and while I was increasingly using the Internet for entertainment at that point, serious usage of it for educational purposes was still lacking. A big sea change for me was attending FSU for my library master’s. At the time, the program was available fully online, but I still didn’t quite trust it and came to school in person to take face to face classes. Of course, many course offerings were only online so I was forced to take online courses anyway. By that point, online research was the norm, and indeed what I spent a lot of my time learning about. I’ve written about this before, how I’ve felt out of place between Gen X and Millennial. Millennial seems to be another term for Digital Native. I suppose I am digital native, but at the older end of it, so perhaps sometimes I struggled and desired for experiences that were more analog, such as my desire to take face to face courses for my masters? Kirschner & De Bruyckere “However, maybe digital natives were not born in 1984, but in 1994 or 2004? In a study of first-year undergraduate students at Hong Kong University, Kennedy and Fox (2013) found that while students appear to use a large quantity and variety of technologies for communication, learning, staying connected with their friends and engaging with the world around them, they are using them primarily for “personal empowerment and entertainment, but not always digitally literate in using technology to support their learning. This is particularly evident when it comes to student use of technology as consumers of content rather than creators of content specifically for academic purposes” (Kennedy & Fox, p. 76).” I’ve also often wondered, when these theorists are talking about different generational gaps, if they shouldn’t move back the concepts associated with generations a few years. Most descriptions of Millennials is from 1980-2000. That’s crazy! That’s a twenty year difference! Someone who was born in 1980 exhibits similar behaviors to someone born in 1999? That doesn’t make sense, at all. At the same time that a 20 year old in 1999 is experiencing the first stirrings of mainstream computing, the person born in 1999 is now as a 20 year old in 2019 experiencing a wildly different information/computer age. I’m not sure what they have in common that grouping them together, as opposed to different groupings, would help you learn more about them. Sorrentino “Digital immigrants are designated as refugees — incapable of staying where they were, hardly accepted where they must go, not prepared for the new country, and nostalgically attached to their origins: “Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the ‘old country’.” [15]” -Yes, I was somewhat perturbed by the implication that, since Plenksy believed Digital immigrants could never really be as adept as digital natives, that real life immigrants would also never be able to be considered true citizens of their new country. Not to mention I disputed with the original conception that Digital Immigrants would somehow always be playing catch up to Digital Natives when it came to computers. Words matter. Analogies work both ways. I think there is something to recognize that people born after a certain year have never known a world in which digital technologies were commonplace. But my parent’s generation never knew a world in which automobiles and air travel was not commonplace. Are they transportation natives, and my grandparents transportation immigrants? What are you really trying to understand when you group generations like this? I feel like these efforts to “generalize” are more about trying to define segments of the population rather than trying to determine truths about them. These generational gaps are so large, too, that the outliers always have vast differences in experience. In reality, I think true generational ages would be strictly limited be about 7 years. I think people born within about 7 years of each other can be expected to have similar life experiences- but of course it’s rolling. So a 7 gap between 1980-1987, I would argue that someone born in 1980 can relate pretty well to someone born in 1987. But someone born in 1987 would also be able to relate pretty well to someone born in 1994. But between 1980 and 1994? Get out of here! The 1980 baby is a teenager in 1994- they aren’t going to share many life experiences in their maturation. Yet these generational age groups usually have large groupings of people like this.