Digital Native

Whenever I hear the term "digital native" i am reminded of a scene in An American Tale where all of the fresh immigrants pass through the customs house on Ellis Island, taking new names and in one sense, stepping from the Old World into the New.  You could see in their eyes the excitement, the apprehension, and the fear.


"I do not repeat DO NOT text nor do I receive text messages" says a recent Facebook post from my grandfather.  Yet in the same household my grandmother has been gushing about her new iPad she got this Christmas.  Funnily enough I don't remember any episodes where I truly felt that there was a "technology gap" between me and my parents.  Rather I've only really seen this with my grandparents, and it has been my parents who are explaining such "simple stupid" things such as changing the settings on a cell phone.  Might parents could perhaps be considered a prototype for the digital native.  My father is somewhat of a techno-phile who always kept his cell phone and computer up to date and is the best I've ever seen at pacman.  My mother, an accountant by degree, does what I can only assume to be black magic in Excel.  

Consummate Digital Native

As a digital native I've been well versed in the culture from an early age.  Perhaps it has something to do with inheriting the brain of an engineer and accountant, but I've always "got" technology.  Yet also I have some perspective of the proliferation of digital devices.  It was a big deal in elementary school when we got a computer lab.  I remember simple math games where we students had to solve multiplication problems to keep a cowboy from falling off a bucking bronco.  It was a strange feeling going to a middle school that wasn't ready to attempt to integrate new technologies and ideas of learning.  Their feeble attempt to show some type of "progress" was to put us in their computer lab, where the first thing a student learned (after how much "Type to Learn" sucked), was how to ALT+TAB between whichever game website wasn't blocked and what we were actually supposed to be doing.  In contrast to this high school was some revolution of beauty and light. Now every paper was required to be typed, double spaced, and perfect MLA format.  Teachers emailed and used powerpoints.  There was one exception to this, I wonder, like sometimes soldiers were with their guns, math teachers are buried with their overhead projects, especially with the way a few of mine clung to them so.