I read a recent report written by the Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. It was entitled, “Reviewing Applicants: Research on Bias and Assumptions”. A somewhat interesting finding in their research was this:
“In a national study, 238 academic psychologists (118 male, 120 female) evaluated a curriculum vitae randomly assigned a male or a female name. Both male and female participants gave the male applicant better evaluations for teaching, research, and service experience and were more likely to hire the male than the female applicant.”
What interests me is not that the male applicant got a better evaluation, but that the people who were evaluating the applications were psychologists, who one might think have a better awareness of gender bias. It leads me to reflect upon two separate discussions I was having recently at ULearn09 with Paul Rodley of Christ’s College, Christchurch New Zealand and Westley Field of Skoolaborate about the use of the term Digital Natives and the assumptions we make when using it.
Is there such a thing as a Digital Native? I’m thinking here of Marc Prensky, and his work on Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants published in 2001. Perhaps it has nothing to do with age, that it’s more about our ability to keep up to date with the developing use of technologies. Just because someone is born inside the beginning of the digital revolution, does not mean that they are a Digital Native. There are degrees of comprehension regarding the use and application of technologies and some ideas regarding technology, which may remain a mystery for many born into the digital age.
The converse it seems to me would also true … however I am then caught by something that my colleague Derek Wenmoth mentioned, which might contradict this notion of age relevance, regarding the way in which his children seemed to view the world. He was suggesting that in spite of his ability to engage with the technical age, it just seemed as if his children viewed the world differently, in a more three dimensional way.
I’ve spent a little bit of time pondering on this and then I heard Prof. Chris Dede speaking recently about immersive technologies and in looking out over the horizon he showed us a video clip from HP called Roku’s Reward, where reality and the virtual world almost seamlessly mixed. It was here that I began to understand what it was that Derek might be trying to articulate. Although new for me … I wonder whether youngsters are already living in this world, and if they are, where are their new horizons leading them right now? Perhaps the ‘two dimensional’ elements of Digital Native / Digital Immigrant should be rephrased to a spectrum of Digital Enlightenment upon which we are all staged at various points, irrespective of age or of prior knowledge.
Tags: horizons4 Comments
Interesting post Sarah - good synthesis of a range of thinking. There is no denying that today’s young people live in a world where they’ve been immersed in digital technologies - and are aware of them both implicitly and explicitly. Where we as “more mature” learners have had to learn and adapt to many of these technologies, our young people simply accept them as the ‘norm’. If this is what defines a ‘digital native’ then one can’t argue. However, the difficulties arise if we then begin to ascribe levels of understanding, maturity of thinking and wisdom about the use of these technologies to our young people - simply because they appear to be more ‘at ease’ with the technologies they’ve grown up with.
When we think in terms of these concepts age certainly isn’t the defining characteristic.
I like your thoughts Sarah and Derek - about digital enlightenment not being age defined. What about the possibility that there have always been people who think in different dimensions. There are many examples in the field of the Arts - a well known one being Picasso who demonstrated in his cubist work the notion of being able to look at an object from multiple points at once. This thinking changed the course of art history - once the thinking had been made visible, many people could see it (even if they were initially scathing and afraid of the power of it)….mmm some parallels to be drawn with technology here? So what about the idea that there have always been multidimensional thinkers and that the digital age lets many more of them become visible and valued? What about the notion that we are all superbly creative (creative natives) and can think in many dimensions - but our evolutionary timing/culture/schooling experiences have left us seeing this only through a fog of vague recognition? A good example of a group of non-young people pushing the boundaries of thinking in nz today are ‘et al’ the un-named artist group who won the Walters prize (like the Turner). They shun personal fame/big dollar sales (similarities here with commons) and their works are designed to challenge, jam the institutions and systems of art and expose our tendency to trust flawed intellectual models! Does this sound familiar thinking to us? http://www.telecomprospect2007.org.nz/artist/etal.shtml
Digital Naturals, or Digital Groovers is another option - regardless of age, some people have it, some don’t, just like a sense of rhythm - expose children to music form an early age then a bigger percentage of them will have a good sense of rhythm, but some people just naturally know how to groove
more thoughts on this here http://tek4l.host4learning.com/?p=95
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