Some things keep coming around and around. A perennial favourite is Marc Prensky’s Digital Native/Immigrant metaphor. It seems to drop in and out of favour with the people in my network and has been the seed of some interesting debate. Just last week, Chris Betcher wrote about his views and how in many cases, the model didn’t hold true.
I used to think of it as a useful model, but one that could
only go so far. But recently, I’ve started to think about it again, only this
time in a new light. I think there are people who are at ease with technology,
who “get” it. And conversely, there are people who find it confusing,
bewildering even and who don’t get it. So, for me, there are Digital Natives
and Immigrants, but the distinction has nothing to do with age. I regard myself
as a Digital Native, and I’m almost 50!! I hear people say that the Natives
have grown up surrounded by computers and technology. But I grew up with
computers too. I got my first computer when I was a teenager. It plugged into
the TV, had 1 kilobyte of RAM and a processor clock speed of 3.5MHz. No hard
drive or even a floppy disk, just a 250 baud cassette interface. I spent
hundreds of hours writing programs in BASIC.

My next computer was far more sophisticated, 16 colour display, 32Kb RAM. My brother and I would spend hours each week painstakingly typing hundreds of lines of code from a magazine to run simple games (which never worked until the following week, when the magazine would correct the errors in last week’s code).
I have two sons – aged 20 and 17. Mr 20 is like me he constantly builds and tinkers. Mr 17, on the other hand is a user. When his internet stops working he comes to me or his brother. When the network shares move or get renamed (did I say I was a tinkerer?) he can’t re-map the drives. So I would say one of my sons is a native and the other is an immigrant. My wife and I are roughly the same age and one of us is a native and one is an immigrant. My 22 year old daughter lies somewhere in the middle – but I can’t think of how to extend the metaphor to suit her.
I have often wondered if perhaps there might be a “Technological Intelligence” in a Gardnerian sense. Some people (adults and children) just seem to have a natural way of working with digital tools whilst others struggle (again both adults and children). Again, it’s not as simple as that. There aren’t 2 groups, there’s a spectrum of skills, use and mindset.
When I run teacher workshops, I often talk about cost/benefit analyses. With every tool, strategy, technology and resource (both analogue and digital) there is a cost to the teacher – in time, physical and intellectual effort and sometimes even money. There is also usually a benefit – to them personally or professionally, but most often to their students. If the benefits outweigh the costs, then it is more likely to be used than if the costs are higher than the benefits.












My daughter is involved in a mammoth task at present. She is tagging all of her music. Like most people her age, she has a huge volume of music in digital form and accesses it from her MP3 player. It’s a combination of CDs she has ripped, music she has downloaded, tracks she has obtained from her friends and other audio from goodness knows where. I too have a fair number of audio files. The main difference between my daughter and I is that all my music is sorted in folders alphabetically, by artist then year then album whereas Gemma doesn’t seem to have much of an organising strategy. So I was surprised when she told me that she wasn’t going to rename or arrange her music files, only the tags. She explained her logic like this.
It doesn’t matter what the files are called or where they are stored. The software and hardware she uses looks at the tags and allows her to sort and filter her music accordingly. So the more accurate the tagging, the easier it is for her to build playlists “No-one plays albums .... people make playlists”. When she builds her playlists, she can use the tags like artist and genre to find the music she wants. When I try to build a playlist it takes me a long time, as I have to navigate through my organised but convoluted folder structure to get to individual files. I can’t really apply any filtering to my files because of the lack of metadata. 
This got me thinking about other media I create and use – images, video, web pages. At present, I don’t really tag anything. I know my camera adds metadata to my photographs – date and time, as well as the other standard EXIF tags. Newer cameras than mine also include GPS location data with the photographs. It only remains to implement some sort of facial recognition algorithm and the tagging is complete. Best of all – it is all done automatically. Once again, it doesn’t matter what you call the image or even where you store it. It’s the metadata that is key. In the age of information explosion, it’s likely that tagging will become more and more important. How do you tag yours?
DrJim
Image citation : http://www.flickr.com/photos/oceanflynn/367600665/
