Technology Article Reflection

The article that I decided to write about was "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky. As we all know, I am a digital immigrant-I came into this new nation, Digital, as an adult. There were no computers of any type or peripherals in my high school years. Even then I recall looking at the whole computer field with great suspicion. It just wasn't something that we were accustomed to in our daily lives. There was no way to mentally encompass the complexity of this new and powerful tool.
While reading Marc Prensky's article, I heard my mind saying, "a-ha!I knew it!". I realized that learning all about computers is a difficult concept for those of us who grew up with pencils, paper, and books. We don't think as fast as the natives nor do most of us have the expansion capabilities to see what can be done with all this new technology. As the author stated,in referring to natives learning from immigrants, "school often feels pretty much as if we've brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them". This is due to the "new language" of the natives being taught to them by the immigrants. Ha! Look at it from the immigrants viewpoint when we decide to go back to school! We are trying to learn a new language that everyone seems to be fluent in, yet there are no dictionaries we can read. We have to figure out the new language with our old, dinosaur minds while trying to maintain a decent grade point average.
It is wonderful to read such articles and realize that the perspective is not just mine. I can't "multitask digitally, and parallel process". I still use the one step at a time approach to learning that I learned in school. Will I ever become as fluent as a native? Nah... As my son, Sam, tells me, "Mom, you just don't have a technological mind". True. But that's because I was born about twenty years too early. However, I am ok with that. I love to read books, and I am known by my first name at the county library. I enjoy thinking slowly about things so that I may think about all aspects. Kind of in the old dinosaur way.