Digital Native or Immigrant? You Decide

Am I a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant?

You decide.

Please add your vote or your view as a comment to this post.

I am of a generation where one might automatically assume I am a Digital Immigrant, rather than a Native.  But technology changes and evolves.  I too, like today's Digital Native students, grew up with technology although it used to be analogue rather than digital.  But it still needed to be mastered and 'driven' in order for it to work properly.

 I have worked with technology all of my working life. My very first job was as a telephone operator in BT (then Post Office Telecommunications), and I drove this switchboard technology (see picture above).
 

 

In those days, international calls couldn’t be dialled direct and had to be connected by the operator (me!), and hand-held personal phones were only to be had on Star Trek.

Later on in my career, I worked with mobile phones and networks systems – including assisting the team working on the launch of the UK’s first hand-held mobile phone (the BT Opal) and the first generation in-car cellular telephone and the related network (Cellnet, which ultimately became O2). 

Subsequently I worked on cordless phones, including the development of the first generation digital ones (CT2), and then in organisational change management before making a career change into teaching in 1995 – when I joined UCL.

With the introduction of the PC (we used manual typewriters or pens before then!), I quickly became au fait with the then DOS system and related software, and then Windows-based software. 

In 1995 I left BT, trained as a teacher and joined UCL where I am a senior teaching fellow.  Amongst other qualifications I hold a PGCE in Post-Compulsory Education and have SEDA accreditation.  I originally joined as a part-time teacher in Project Management, but over the years my course has grown from the initial 70 students to over 500, and is now delivered 7 times in an academic year.  In addition, I run a continuing professional development (CPD) course in project management for delegates from industry, a one-week intensive course (the APMP qualification) which is also run about 7 times per year.

Current Use of Technology

Technology has been vital throughout my UCL career in helping me to continue to manage my continually growing portfolio of courses and expanding student base.  I have always made extensive use of Windows-based packages such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Visio, and I consider myself to be very proficient in their use.  One of my personal development goals for this year is to become equally proficient with MS Project 2010 which, you might think quite surprisingly, I know the least.

As well as Microsoft packages, I also use the following technologies at work for e-learning:

Moodle

I use Moodle for all of my courses, and it has been a real ‘lifesaver’ in particular in helping me to manage the 500-strong course which is run in multiple deliveries and with a combination of different teaching fellows;  in particular, the ‘groupings’ facility which enabled me to treat each delivery as its own entity but on the same Moodle site, where the lecture notes are the same for all students (who have the same exam), but specific lecture materials may differ in terms of how delivered as there are several teachers on the course.

Lecturecast

I use both the in-class and personal recording facilities on Lecturecast.  At present these provide retrospective recordings of lectures and other information items for reference and revision purposes, however I am keen to experiment with other uses, for example, lecture ‘flipping’ and distance learning.

Turning Point

I am new to the Turning Point voting systems technology and have been experimenting with using it to collect delegate feedback on my APMP course.  This is another technology which I wish to learn more about, the issue at the moment being finding the time to play around with it extensively and see what it can / cannot do and what its facilities and foibles are.

Social Media

I use most mainstream social media and mobile digital devices, but these are primarily for personal interactions and I prefer to keep this quite separate from my professional life.  Again, an early adopter and have been on these sites since their early days.  I have been a blogger since 2005 and this is the one personal life technology which I have used for work.  For several years before the existence of Moodle in UCL, I used Blogger as a means of providing on-line support to students on the courses I was teaching at the time.  The blog I am using here is one such example, if you look at previous posts, although it hasn't been used for this purpose since the advent of Moodle.  Here is another example, the blog from a previous Product Innovation course that I used to teach.

Am I Native or Immigrant?

I have always been a fairly early adopter of new technologies, and - whilst I didn't grow up in a Digital world - I use it fairly extensively for someone my age.  The majority of my friends my age (although with a couple of exceptions) can barely drive-mail and don't even use Smartphones, for example, preferring the voice / text only simplicity of the old-style mobile phones.

Based on my reflections here, I suspect am probably a Digital Immigrant rather than Native – I consider myself very trainable, and once adopted I like to develop my knowledge of a technology’s features and ‘push’ some of the more advanced facilities.

Native or Immigrant?  What do you think?

Or maybe I am an Analogue Native who became wedded to Digital (and thus secured my Digital Passport!).