Sep 27
Digital Holidaymakers
in excellence, technology
5 Comments »

castle.jpgAt the Scottish Learning Festival this year, I heard numerous people questioning Perensky’s perceived wisdom regarding the Digital Immigrant/Digital Native divide.

In a chance discussion yesterday with Maggie Irving, Education Support Officer for ICT in Argyll & Bute, she threw a third tier into the equation (how’s that for a mixed metaphor!) – that of ‘digital holidaymakers’.

What does she mean by digital holidaymakers? Quite simply, they aren’t trying to emigrate anywhere. They are quite happy where they are. Worse still, when on digital holiday, they’ll try the new customs, quite happily go through the process and then at the end of their time in ‘digital land’, go back home to their own comfortable customs – they way they do things quite satisfactorily already.

Do you know any digital holidaymakers? Quite probably yes. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of leading in-service training on any ICT, you’ll definitely have met some. They are the ones that will attend in-service training as it’s a ‘day out’, go through the process of learning new things, cope well with the new ideas and then leave at the end of the day having shelved absolutely everything they learned – it was a day out of school after all, and the tutor was quite entertaining.

You’ll have met them on a day to day basis too. They are the ones that will incorporate ICT into lessons, units and topics where it explicitly says so. They are the ones that will use ICT to teach skills exclusively and make no connections to anything elsewhere in the curriculum. They are the ones that use the interactive whiteboard only on the day the QIO or HMIe comes to visit.

How do we crack this problem? I think there are two issues here:

1. We need to be less prescriptive. Fortunately, everything I have heard about Curriculum for Excellence seems to be pointing in this way (but would share Michael Fullan’s observation that it is too fuzzy/woolly/indistinct). People need to know that it’s ok to experiment.

2. Our culture needs to be more accepting of variety. This needs to come from the top down – teachers and students need to know that it’s ok to submit that report as a video or podcast instead of printed A4. How you change that culture is a whole other post!

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5 Responses to “Digital Holidaymakers”
 

I think that all of us who support our colleagues, immigrants or holidaymakers, are digital travel agents. We try to make the trip pleasant, rewarding and stress-free in the hope that our holidaymakers will return often and perhaps even consider immigrating!

Maggie Irving wrote on September 27th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

 

Maggie – here’s to the supporters! In whatever guise they take – colleagues, LA personnel, pupils and even friends? Help and advice comes from the most unlikely of places sometimes.

Ian – I don’t know why your comment got wiped – it was there yesterday, and today it’s not… I’m having major problems with SPAM filtering at the moment – I can feel a blog upgrade coming on…

ab wrote on September 28th, 2007 at 9:01 am

 

Andrew,

I also think that Prensky, in his quest for publishable simplicity, forgot about the digital pioneers (for want of a better expression) – those from the ‘immigrant’ population who were early on the scene to explore and map the digital world. They were naive, they often got things badly wrong, but they did – intuitively – know that this technology thing would one day be of fundamental importance to education.

John Connell wrote on September 29th, 2007 at 11:38 pm

 

Hey `Maggie Irving’ Pioneer of blogging (how many years ago was that?)in Argyll was finally constrained to write upon a blog. :D
As to the issue, I think it is called professionalism. If the holidaymakers get just a wee thing to take home to use, then the job is done. It might not be anything that had been on the agenda, course notes, but something the holiday maker picked up over lunch!
John..from an immigrant. position..I cannot agree with you more. I was one such! I think I might now be in dinosaur category!! 1994 ‘Art and the mac’ That’s what got me hooked. So in this realm, I am now a facilitator…..I teach what I know and encourage forward movement, and applaud it.

Marlyn Moffat wrote on October 4th, 2007 at 11:17 pm

 

John – it’s a shame that the pioneers are often forgotten. We need to learn far more from them. They weren’t afraid of failing or being seen to fail – something I worry about with a Curriculum for Excellence. I’m very much reminded of Thomas Edison and his attitude to failure!

Marlyn – like many out there, and many before her, Maggie decided blogging wasn’t for her. She does however have a great website full of ideas, tools, resources and perhaps above all help and challenges which serves her needs (and the needs of her audience) far more than a blog does. FWIW, I’m sorry I boxed her into a corner by quoting her in this post, as there is only one thing worse that bating someone in a blogpost (that being not attributing sources?) To set the record straight though, she has commented on blog posts in the past, present and no doubt the future! With such a wealth of means of communication, each of us makes our own choices about how we interact with others.

I would hope we are all facilitators – regardless of our point of entry into using technology. For me, it’s not really the moment of revelation that counts, it’s what we do beyond that, and how we encourge others?

ab wrote on October 5th, 2007 at 8:41 am

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