Digital Nation

Digital Nation

This video was assigned to us in our online class this past week.  It's a full-fledged documentary (about an hour and a half long) and it brings up a lot of interesting points.  As someone who feels stuck between this digital age and "the old days," I am really fascinated to hear about this new generation that has grown up never knowing anything other than always being connected.  According to this video, I am an "immigrant" to this world: as connected as I feel, I'm not a digital native like these young people. ...That makes me feel old.

The section on the middle school in the Bronx fascinated me.  It doesn't surprise me one bit that after getting laptops and access to technology in school that they were more engaged and gang activity went down.  The projects that were being done with technology are just more engaging for students, and technology is enhancing their learning of the material.

On the flip side...the next section talks about how students are becoming "dumber."  Their academic capabilities aren't the same as they used to be.  Teachers cannot assign novels longer than 200 pages because student simply don't have the attention span and won't read it.  Students no longer write essays...they write in paragraphs.  They are too distracted, too busy, to sit down and write more than one paragraph at a time.  This is the negative of the digital nation, and this is what worries me.  Why can we not have the best of both worlds--the positives we are seeing at places like the middle school in the Bronx, but also still being able to write and read a book proficiently?

There will always be positives and negatives--it all depends on how you let it into your life.  I feel grateful that I am at an age where I have been able to embrace technology and it has affected my life greatly, but that I know what it is like to live without it--there was life before technology, and it was pretty good.  We all got along without it.  But that was in a different time, with a different generation.  I am trying to embrace the fact that there are people who don't know what that's like.