Torn Between Two Worlds
After reading Prensky’s two articles, I think I may be both a Digital Native and Digital Immigrant. I remember growing up; we were always outside playing for endless hours or playing board games or reading and coloring. Very rarely did we watch television, except at nap time, and computers weren't really around me. When I was in middle school, we used computers more in school and we finally got one at our house and to get online, we used Prodigy. This was a program like AOL but before AOL had come out.
I can relate to many things Prensky mentions in his articles for being a Digital Native and a Digital Immigrant. For example, I prefer to print out emails or documents to edit them, rather than first doing it on the computer (Prensky 1.2) but at the same time, I will turn to the Internet as first choice to find information on anything (Prensky 1.2).
Having grown up in the time where technology was booming, I do not now and never have enjoyed video games, whether it being watching them or playing them. I find it amusing that my son can play them for as long as I allow and still want more time and when he asks me for help, I can't play them. I have turned to buying him games that will help him learn, rather than the typical fighting games, and I feel they have helped him tremendously with learning letters, numbers, shapes, counting, etc. and I will agree with Prensky when he stated that this generation learn from games better (Prensky 2. 5 and Prensky 2.6). For myself, I cannot say that the learning games helped me growing up because I was never interested in them and had no patience to learn them. I enjoyed the old fashioned way of learning from a text book.
I use computers on a daily basis whether it is for work or personal use. For work, I use a CAD (Computer-Aided Drafting) program which requires computer skills. For personal use, I'm always on the Internet or Facebook or sometimes just playing computer games. I have found it easy for myself to learn new computer programs although, not from reading the manual or instructions. I learn from playing with the software and sometimes taking a class and having an instructor teach it.
I have a laptop at home with wireless connection, which I find very useful. At work, I can use the Internet on my work computer to log in to class, but only if it’s on my lunch break. I typically only go online for the class at night, after my son has gone to bed or when he is watching his shows. If I go online while at work, it’s usually just to read some of the posts because I don't have enough time to actually complete an assignment.