Native vs. Immigrant... who is learning from whom?

I find the idea of Digital Native vs Digital Immigrant interesting.  It makes sense to me that children growing up in a world filled with technology would certainly be more “fluent” in  technology, and that it would cause our brains to evolve in order to adapt to the difference between the different speeds and processing skills required for living in the digital age.  However, the article by Boyd made me think more deeply about what it means to have fluency with something. Children growing up today have access to far more technology than those before them, that cannot be disputed.  However, although they are deeply engaged, most are only engaged at a surface level. There is a huge variation in the knowledge, skills and experiences children have, but we tend to think of them all as fluent because they can quickly navigate through an interface on a computer or ipad.  Instead of seeing this surface level of understanding as fluency, we need to do a better job of building tech competencies to insure they are able to be contributors and producers rather than just consumers. I think we often assume children know the tech competencies appropriate for their age because they have so much experience with technology on a daily basis.  However, this can be dangerous because they are so tech savvy but so naive to the bigger picture which Boyd defines as: 

How to look for and interpret information found online

Control personal information

Engage productively in networked situations

The article continues to describe why this is the case, the technologies are designed for ease of use, this way they reach a wide audience. Because of their ease, many do not know much about how they actually work, leaving us with a population that uses something they do not really understand.

Our district worked in grade level teams with the STEM coordinator to develop a list of Tech Competencies for each grade level as a way to start to combat this issue of limited meaning and understanding in order to hopefully build a cohort of students who are informed and educated around the technology powerhouse - good, bad and indifferent. We used the following resource as a framework for our work.

We want knowledgeable, smart consumers who grow into knowledgeable smart producers.  This process helped us to better understand what we wanted each grade level to know and be able to do while also providing us with a scope and sequence to ensure the children were building knowledge on what they had learned in previous years.  It also provided us with an opportunity to have conversations about technology, something we don’t often do. Having these conversations allowed people to share ideas in a comfortable setting, making it a little less intimidating for those “immigrants” who tend to shy away from the topic in their classrooms. Oftentimes, it is less teaching as there is a lot more  value in the doing.  Getting your hands dirty and trying it out is oftentimes the  best way to learn and is such a powerful message to send to children, when they see their teacher as a learner.

Both the native and the immigrant have things to offer and things to learn.  Together, I think they have it all!