I really like the classifications, native and imigrant. Like Kelly, I think i’m somewhere between the two, even though when I was growing up there WERE no home computers; or rather, very few. But like my parents’ generation, we grew up watching the technology happen, evolve, mold us and society around it. When my parents were growing up, there was no space travel, manned or otherwise. Now, i have hopes that when my son is writing HIS reflections, travel to the moon or elsewhere will be as commonplace as satellites giving us the news.
My first experience with anything “high tech”, believe it or not, goes back to a color TV. We had none, and mom wouldn’t allow one until our old, 15 inch B & W died. My dad literally tossed the daggone thing down the stairs, and it wouldn’t die. It was her hint, however, to let us get a color TV. I was in high school, and my brother and i nearly killed it playing tennis and “Pong” using the only game console out in the mid 80’s (i don’t even remember what it was called). The first time i ever saw the “horse of a different color” actually CHANGE colors, i was in college.
Then my brother (the “brain”) got a Commodore 64. I had NO interest. bleh. Write on IT?? Not see the words on paper? Are you INSANE??
I was dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age post 1990 by my advisor for my Master’s, who thought it was criminal I was still writing using pen and paper. She required i do all my work on floppy (remember those old 5 1/4 ” ones??), and turn it in that way, including my thesis and dissertation agruments / justifications. grrrrrrrrrrr
So my dad got me a “luggable,” lovingly called Igor – 70 lbs if it was an ounce, 4 ” green screen, and a key board attached by a 5″ cord. I hated that thing. But i used it.
I got addicted to using the net once I moved to SC. I had used the computer for writing essays and lesson plans (after i’d written and hashed it out on paper, of course) for the 7 years i’d been teaching, but i had no net access, and neither did the school i worked at. In this tiny little SC town i lived and worked in, i had DSL at my house, and net in my class room. I was hooked. I used it for EVERYTHING – lessons, info, chatting (once I was divorced), … even found my long-lost high school sweet -heart through the net.
I took it on myself to learn as much as I could to be an effective USER of the new technology. How to use the programs, install software, write basic code, fix hardware problems… basically, i becames a jack of all trades as far as the COMPUTER itself is concerned. So when it comes to “talking the tak” with my kids, i can understand them, even if my “language” is a bit old-fashioned for them. Now i use the net 85% of the time for planning my class activities, and am an EverQuest (aka EverCrack) fanatic.
But for writing? I encourage my kids to write on the computer and edit later; i encourage them to even turn in their work on disc as well as paper… but i still want – NEED – that paper. I still teach notecard usage, and edit on hard copy.
Do they think it’s silly? A waste of time? yes… but when your computer freezes up or “burps” and you lose what you forgot to save… those note cards and that paper becomes gold.
This is the first time – short of emails which are an average of 5 lines long – that i’m writing straight to computer, and NOT writing it out long hand first… and it’s KILLING me!! 
Do I agree we as old-tech or no tech teachers have a harder time communicating to our kids? Yes. Do I agree their actual BRAIN may be different? Yes, even to that. Perhaps what we label as ADD or ADHD is no more than a reflection of the changing brain patterns we are inheriting from our tech-saturated kids. Do we need to change our teaching styles? … yes, to a point. We can’t lose sight that, no matter HOW tech heavy our life becomes, we STILL have books, and manuals, and labels, and we still have snail mail, and resumes, and places where low-tech is not only used, but preferred. We can’t STOP teaching that way, simply because technology has entered our lives so intimately.
Now – try to tell that to some of our non-writing, non-tech comrades in the trenches… and if you come back whole from the encounter, I’ll hand you a purple heart myself.
19 responses so far ↓
1
lynsey
// Feb 26, 2006 at 1:34 am
Hi Shannon –
As another edublogger, I can share that after the digital migrants and digital natives had slightly faded from the yabba that is eduspeak we (my wife and I) were at the 2005 Ascilite conference (with mild mannered James Farmer). Just before James’s presentation there was some dude and his handmaiden presenting on the merits or lack thereof of blogs and as a result of this inept and shameful presentation, I coined a new definition – digital wankers. People who think they have an answer which involves Mark Prensky’s single party piece, coupled with some high tech doodad…but can’t so much as deliver at a conference using powerpoint.
Fortunately, James withered them with a superb presentation immediately after, and when that finished I slunk away to have a hack at the computers in the library…
Meanwhile, keep blogging and writing and communicating. Don’t worry about anyone else’s ideas, just use your own experiences. It’s more than enough. Ultimately all we’re ever trying to do is communicate…
Cheers
Lynsey
2
Karen McComas
// Feb 26, 2006 at 8:02 am
This is what I think important and useful: Shannon puts her thoughts in her blog for all of us to see and we begin to see what Britton (I think) referred to as “shaping at the point of utterance” and it is in this shaping that everyone gets changed to some extent. Shannon even senses the importance of this given her desire to write/journal about her teaching (in another post I just read).
This is good stuff!
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