Are you a digital native?

After watching several video's about being a digital native, it helped me understand why I find working with the computer, operating all the peripherals for the television and using my cell phone can be so frustrating. I am not a digital native. I am an digital immigrant. Not just any ordinary immigrant but an older immigrant. According to one of the videos I watched, a
digital immigrant has trouble learning how to use and function in our new digital world. Presumably, it is harder for our brain to learn a new language when we become older and that learning new digital technology is similar to that. Having not grown up with digital technology that puts me in the category of being a digital immigrant. It is my personal believe that it is just not the fact that the technology is foreign to me but that the technology has glitches in it. For example; my high definition TV was not working but my old analog TV connected via cable directly to the TV, not through a box, worked. My first thought was, there is something wrong with the TV. I grab the TV manual and I go through all the problem solving suggestions and the TV still does not work. To make the story short, there was nothing wrong with the TV. It was a problem with the cable provider. Yes, it may be hard to learn to be a digital native. The problem is not just learning the digital skills and how to apply it coherently, but the fact software glitches and hardware compatibility confuses the understanding. It is similar to how accents and dialects of speech confuses the understanding of a new language.

As far as responding to how digital savvy students should be taught, I would need more information on how the educators feel it should be addressed. Maybe it will evolve by itself as the digital native replaces the digital immigrant. The only other choice would be to educate the digital immigrant first.

computer literacy as it relates to the craft artist.

The artist craft person will need to use a word processing program, spread sheets, various data bases, desk top publishing and computer assisted drawing programs. Every part of your business is impacted by computer technology from computers you use to conduct daily business maintenance to the raw supplies you use to produce your product. The precious metal a jeweler uses to fabricate an item will be removed from the ground using equipment that has embedded computers controlling how it operates. Many tools used in the fabrication also has embedded computers.

I have mixed emotions about how computer technology has impacted what is available to me for all the different crafts I love to make. For example, my sewing machine interacts with my lap top assisting me to program complicated stitching programs. It is great, but I am still struggling to figure out how to make it all work together.

I have a digital camera to produce great photos of my hand crafted items, but I am struggling trying to figure out how to use photo shop for marketing purposes.

Comment on "We Think" by Charles Leadbeater

This is about the pros and con's of the technology available to us to learn and communicate. In particular using the world wide web.

Communication is the largest reason people use the Web. Communication can also be done in real-time.

Through the use of the World Wide Web we have unlimited information available to us. We are limited only by ourselves. Sure the information at times is censored and biased but we need to use our sense of reason to analyse it and learn from it.

What a great time we live in.