Digital Immigrants
This past December, I went to visit my parents for Christmas. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been a computing family. They bought me the first programmable game console in 1980-81 called the Odessey 2. They later bought me a Texas Instruments TI-99A home computer. And in 1984, we got our first Apple, the Apple //e. Today they use an iMac at home.
Both of my parents, as it turned out, were heavily involved with computers in their work. My father had job titles including “programmer” and “systems analyst.” My mother, before she retired, was head of the technical services department in a public library, and among her duties, was to manage the computer system responsible for the library catalog and check-out of books. Despite this history, it seems, they are still digital immigrants.
When I got home, I wrote down a number of things that happened during my visit, and I wanted to talk about two of them here. To wit, the first.
“Look, mom, I have 400 photos here on my phone.” My mother, upon seeing the iPhone, wondered why we would want to carry so many digital photos around with us, on the phone.
Like a lot of cell phones, the iPhone lets you take pictures and they are stored on the phone. Connect the iPhone to your computer, and you can put them on the computer. This part, I am sure, she gets. But these 400-some photos were not pictures I took with the phone; these pictures were ones I had taken on vacations with my Canon camera.
It was just this morning that I was watching television that I saw an ad for a photo wallet. It was not precisely the same thing seen here at Brookstone, but it was the same idea… a small electronic device with a mini screen for displaying photos you load off of your computer, to carry around. All the folks in the commercial were at least 50 years old.
They proudly showed off friends (picture a senior citizen luncheon) pictures of their grand kids on this little device (two easy payments of $19.95). I wonder how they are selling.
I told my mother, politely: “Mom, why? Why not? If I’m sitting around and want to look through pictures, why carry around some big album? I can carry an impossibly-sized album around with me. If I talk about my trip to Hong Kong, Bam!, there they are…”
She retored: “Well, I wouldn’t want to carry around photos like that… what would I show?”
Granted, my mom basically takes pictures of flowers that she can find around the house. Nothing too interesting to show anyone. But certainly her drawers of photos could be digitized and used on such a device. But her disinterest in this way of dealing with photos revealed for me, part of her personal digital culture–something I have discussed before at conferences. A colleague of mine and I often talk about this as being a significant indicator on how teachers might use technology that we provide. It’s also a concept I hope to explore more, into the future.
During my visit, one of the things I did was gift the OS X Leopard operating system to my parents. Upon checking things out after the installation, I encountered my dad. We had another instance of him revealing his own personal digital culture.
“Dad–where are your documents? I think something is wrong here.” John, I don’t have any documents. I sat there, dumbfounded. I asked again. “No, you have to have documents… but your documents folder is empty. Was there nothing in there?” Nope.
Every morning I caught my dad online, at the same webpage, Morningstar, tracking his investments. But whatever he was tracking wasn’t done digitally; he used no spreadsheet, no text file, nothing digital. Instead, he printed the webpage, and wrote notes on the actual paper, about plans to change monies between accounts, or how much or how little the investments had bettered.
Later in the day, I wanted to sit on a seat that had a pile of papers on it. “Don’t move those, your dad will get upset,” my mom warned me. I asked what they were. “His financial print-outs; he prints everything out.”
So dad did have “documents,” they were simply all paper. My head started to hurt; I considered crying; I felt shame for our family name.
Of course, there was nothing to be ashamed of. Then Christmas came, and my mom received a “daily planner.” She had been using iCal to keep track of things, now she admitted to all of us, she was glad she could write on paper again to keep track of things. “This is so much better than trying to do things on the computer–I was printing so many pages out!”
Okay, that shame feeling came back. Here I was, with whatever labels that had been applied to me over the past 10 years (Mr. iPod, Mr. Podcast, Dr. Macintosh, technology guru, etc., etc.) and my poor parents were using the computer to make fancy, type-written pages.
I now realize there is nothing to be ashamed of. My parents are, for lack of a better term, digital immigrants. Things are easier for them in a world of paper and ballpoint pens. Sure, they e-mail, video iChat with me, and my dad even gets text messages on the cell phone.
The question becomes then, especially for me as someone who works with educators at their own various stages of advancement with their personal digital cultures: “How important is it to change one’s personal culture with regard to digital media to effectively teach students for preparation in a digitally-saturated world?”
The other day, I sat down with a colleague to plan future staff development courses. While my computer was booted and ready to go, some instinct told me to use paper and a pen to write-down some of these ideas. My mind flashed-back to my parents. I had this trait too, this instinct for paper and pen.
When I returned to call-up a webpage on my laptop, it was frozen. I rebooted and it wouldn’t let me log in. Later in the day, I discovered that the hard drive needed replacement.
Suddenly, I realized that a school with a diversity of digital personal cultures was likely a great thing.