Text Overview 2019

Digital Native or Not?

I was born prior to most of the modern day technology youth have access to today. Although I was not born into this technology, my early childhood years saw the transition into today's modern technologies. Due to this, I think of myself more as a digital native than a digital immigrant. Though I was born in a time when cellphones and laptops were not quite as ubiquitous as they are today, I spent most of my time with the forms of technology that were available to me. As a 6 or 7 year old, I would play Nintendo 64 or Playstation or Gameboy, which were new and advanced for the time. By the time I was in middle school, I was spending a lot of time on the desktop computer, on websites such as Myspace (shoutout to Tom !). I developed the 'native' skills of twitch speed or parallel processing while going down Wikipedia rabbit holes while playing flash games in another tab.

danah boyd vs Prensky - Digital Nativism

Are today's youth digital natives? In the debate of digital nativism between boyd and Prensky, I wholeheartedly agree with boyd's perspective. Digital nativism is the idea some generations are digital natives, meaning they naturally adept at navigating and understanding digital technologies and systems. On the other hand, the existence of a digital native implies the idea of digital immigrants, or those who are foreign to the digital familiarity experienced by natives. In chapter 7 of danah boyd's It's Complicated , she discusses the idea of digital nativism and how it is actually dangerous mindset to have. To start, boyd discusses that the idea of nativism vs immigrant truthfully stems from the fear created by generational gaps which are increasingly illustrated through technology use. She paraphrases Barlow when she discusses that, "the implicit fear that stems from the generational gap that has emerged around technology." The idea of generational tensi...

Assignment B - Taking it All Home!

This week's reading was theTeaching Tolerance article Teaching at the Intersections by Monita K. Bell. In this article, the idea of 'intersectionality' is discussed, and what that means for educators and our students. Various student experiences are discussed throughout the article as a way to make sense of the idea of intersectionality. In my experience, intersectionality has been framed as the threat of discrimination due to one or multiple of your identity markers. In this way, a student in the article, named G.G., is used as an example of the ways in which multiple markers can disadvantage someone beyond just one of their identity markers. Being black and female and queer presents the potential for increased instances of discrimination due to one, multiple, or all of those markers. In order to be effective educators, we must view our students " through an intersectional lens: recognizing that race-, gender- and class-related circumstances a...

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