Wednesday 25 February 2009

Digital Pioneers - (tech adopter) Digital Immigrants bite back

Marc Prensky's terms digital immigrant and native were useful back in 2001 or so. They have become somewhat dated and there has been a backlash from those digital immigrants who have grown up and adopted each new digital medium/technology - the digital pioneers.
Most commentators put it this way (and I substitute my personal experience in place of theirs):
"I first encountered mainframe computers back in 1977 using a DEC mainframe - to start it you pressed a series of buttons to tell it to read a small length of punched tape; this tape taught it to read the fast paper tape reader; many yards of punched tape later and the computer was ready for use - no CRT screens, everything printed on teleprinter on paper, programming in BASIC.
Then came the Sinclair computers - my favourite was the ZX Spectrum, storage - cassette tape. After that various PCs including the BBC Computer. Macs around the mid 90s with my first internet usage and e-mails. Website production and all the Web 1.0 stuff in the early years of this century leading to the more recent Web 2.0 stuff. Digital Immigrant? Hardly, we grew up through all the technology!"
Kathy Schrock puts this very nicely in this video from Vimeo :

Digital Pioneer: The Movie from Kathy Schrock on Vimeo.

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