People and technologies

Just as there is a spectrum of digital natives, young people who got on the bus at different stages, the same it true of digital immigrants. It was really impressive to see folk not just paying lip service to social networking stuff, but using it in a way that has clearly transformed their practice. This isn’t an age thing – some of the older hands are nostalgic for the frontier days of the internet, without realising that it is all (sort of) happening again. It is one thing to know about Facebook, flickr etc, another thing entirely to jump in and swim around in all that stuff. The folk who know the names of the new stuff but don’t use it are just like people from a few years back whose attitude to students was “we have found this wonderful thing called the Internet, let us show you how to use it…” There are still a lot of educational developers, learning technologists, and librarians whose first, often unconscious, reaction to the new stuff is to somehow try to rein it in, or put some controls onto it, or think along the lines of “people think this is fun, but it could be really educational, if only...”

This is going to sound odd, but the people I see at the cutting edge of all this stuff are thinking differently about a lot of things – things like: privacy; currency of knowledge; what constitutes true expertise; what is the best way of communicating with others; what scholarship means; and even, friendships. I was quite sceptical about things like MUVEs etc, but having seen the way folk in this community act, I am softening up. The starting point for everything around all this new stuff, it seems to me, is the truism that the best way to find something out is to ask a friend. This goes right across the whole social networking/ Web 2.0 stuff, whether it a student working on a group project and IM-ing their friends who are in other groups, to having friends who you have never met in the flesh, to willingly sharing stuff with others (all over the world) whether it is expertise or dumb questions you feel uncomfortable asking.

The other truism relevant here is “two heads are better than one”, you don’t have to know all about the collective unconsciousness, or meme theory to realise that all of a sudden connecting with people is getting exciting again. If you still think the web is a bit of a mess, with lots of dodgy information and dodgy people; that email basically is a bit of a pain; that you don’t quite understand your mobile phone; that, sometimes, life was better before all this crap (it’s OK that’s how I feel a fair proportion of the time) – move on, and have a go in this world.