Image = "Day 10 // Continental Divide" CC flickr user: Eelke de Blouw
The podcast "pre-reading" on digital immigrants and natives for today's class was interesting but leaves me with mixed feelings and unsure of exactly where I stand.
I have always been an early adopter and have had a great deal of exposure to computers and the net, long before most people. This is because my father is a retired academic. As a child, in my school holidays I sometimes went in to his workplace and I saw him entering holed punch cards into very large computers at one of the universities. Later, we had CP/M based desktop computers, then MSDOS & PCs, then Windows and so on. My mother and father both had access to "Mosaic", the pre-cursor to Netscape Navigator in the early nineties when I had just started university.
So I have loved computers and tech since before they became the basis of mass consumer advertising and became fashionably "cool".
So it is easy and comfortable for me to defend the great wonders and exciting opportunities in class. Especially when there is great uncertainty amongst many of my fellow students. Very often in this world, anger is driven by fear which is driven by lack of knowledge or exposure. It is an uncomfortable feeling when our "juniors" know more about something than we do. Historically, elders tended to carry the most amount of knowledge and wisdom, and this is a little different.
But in other settings, I often adopt a different view. Not to be contrary. But because I feel divided. Many people see technology as the answer to all the world's ills. I disagree. It is hard to think of a technology that we have invented that didn't do almost as much harm as it did good. There are a few, but many such as motor vehicles or our ability to split the atom, were a double-edged sword. Web 2.0 may turn out to be similarly nuanced. The other aspect of this that I'm not so sure about is the school of "inevitability". To some extent technological change is indeed inevitable, but it is not inevitable that kids have to reduce play time outside, or that they must be bought a mobile phone aged 6. We have power as voters and as parents to help shape our society. Not necessarily through laws and through censorship, but more through education, incentives and other "soft" measures.
The podcast "pre-reading" on digital immigrants and natives for today's class was interesting but leaves me with mixed feelings and unsure of exactly where I stand.
I have always been an early adopter and have had a great deal of exposure to computers and the net, long before most people. This is because my father is a retired academic. As a child, in my school holidays I sometimes went in to his workplace and I saw him entering holed punch cards into very large computers at one of the universities. Later, we had CP/M based desktop computers, then MSDOS & PCs, then Windows and so on. My mother and father both had access to "Mosaic", the pre-cursor to Netscape Navigator in the early nineties when I had just started university.
So I have loved computers and tech since before they became the basis of mass consumer advertising and became fashionably "cool".
So it is easy and comfortable for me to defend the great wonders and exciting opportunities in class. Especially when there is great uncertainty amongst many of my fellow students. Very often in this world, anger is driven by fear which is driven by lack of knowledge or exposure. It is an uncomfortable feeling when our "juniors" know more about something than we do. Historically, elders tended to carry the most amount of knowledge and wisdom, and this is a little different.
But in other settings, I often adopt a different view. Not to be contrary. But because I feel divided. Many people see technology as the answer to all the world's ills. I disagree. It is hard to think of a technology that we have invented that didn't do almost as much harm as it did good. There are a few, but many such as motor vehicles or our ability to split the atom, were a double-edged sword. Web 2.0 may turn out to be similarly nuanced. The other aspect of this that I'm not so sure about is the school of "inevitability". To some extent technological change is indeed inevitable, but it is not inevitable that kids have to reduce play time outside, or that they must be bought a mobile phone aged 6. We have power as voters and as parents to help shape our society. Not necessarily through laws and through censorship, but more through education, incentives and other "soft" measures.
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