Current Issues Critical Thinking

Week 3 Journal
Jennifer Strope
September 16, 2013

I could not in good conscience just write on one small snippet of information from a very long document. I’m not going to say I read every last word but I skimmed over the general stuff, read deeply into the more specific stuff and paused especially at the author(s) comparisons between their lives as Digital Immigrants and those of Digital Natives (the children born into immersive technology). My first thought on the selected statement from the document is “Yes, Right on!” Children are learning differently, expressing themselves in ways that confound adults and push the boundaries of what we expect and assume. My second thought though is; has not every generation in its own way been fundamentally different than the generation before them? I submit that if we were convinced that we were only looking at a recent radically fundamental change in this new generation that we would be blind to the truth. Where did this immersive technology that they were born into come from? My husband was born while the house he grew up in was being built. He did not build it though his father did. The previous generation creates the world the new generation is born into. So this fundamentally different way of thinking already existed BEFORE the generation of digital natives ever rose up. I think what we are seeing is what has been going on since the dawn of time. In the cycle of intellectual advancement we begin with the current established generation who is pretty content with how things are. From that generation comes the few that fundamentally think differently, your Thomas Edison’s, your Nikola Tesla’s, your Albert Einstein’s, and your Steven Jobs. As a side note Apple’s newest slogan is simply Think Different. The point is it is from these pioneers that things like electricity becomes commonplace, then commonplace in our homes till it is just something to the new generation that was always there. Every fundamentally different change eventually becomes part of normalcy for the next generation. I don’t think we are looking at anything all that spectacular or that has not or will not happen again. Out of this digital natives mark my words will come a tiny group of pioneers into the next fundamentally different way of thinking for the generation that follows them.

Now that I have gone way overboard on the first question, let’s try and get through the remaining ones. I have to believe that every generation learns differently than the past one; the advances in medicine, science, and technology are testaments to those differences. But the ground work for those differences as I mentioned are laid by the pioneers who came from the previous generation. As for how this affects my future role as an educator and what implications it will have, I don’t think it will have that drastic an effect as one would think. I say that because I feel that by nature of me wanting to be a better teacher I am going to use the technology that I have become comfortable with, bringing that into my teaching, allowing students to absorb my experiences and enjoyment I already get from using technology in my daily life.  I think what the great educators of the past present and future all have in common is the balance between sharing honestly with the next generation what they do know, and being open and receptive to having what they do know challenged and even overthrown without taking it personally. Without this balance we would still believe the world is flat, have no idea that microscopic things called germs make people sick, have no nuclear energy, the list is endless. So the only implication for me would be letting my pride in what I know blind me or prevent me from getting a glimpse of the future.