Comments on: This just in: Teachers are people, too!

By: MariaD

MariaD — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:30:43 +0000

“The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.” I know quite a lot of parents who discourage children from using computers - EVER - or limit computer use to word processing, pretty much. Some people even in industrialized countries don’t have computers at home by choice, and of course most people in the world still can’t afford personal computers. I think we can’t expect universal computer literacy from people of any age, yet.

It does weird me out in many ways.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:18:34 +0000

The weird thing about it is, it’s surprising that they don’t get it.

Which actually bring up a point for me: What’s the cutoff for these digital natives we like to talk about so much? I’ve been using the internet to collaborate and connect with people since I was in high school, over a decade ago. I’m obviously a huge geek, since that’s something not everybody did back then, but does that make me a digital native? Or did I get started too late? These young teachers are 6 or 7 years younger than me, so quite frankly I would have thought they would be digital natives and would better understand how easy it is to find anything.

By: MariaD

MariaD — Sun, 04 May 2008 12:44:23 +0000

“some Facebook or MySpace teacher profiles, which are far, far away from sanitized Web sites ending in “.edu”

I think this misuse of spatial metaphor pretty much summarizes the problem. People still think site boundaries mean something. These teachers probably don’t realize that a search by name brings everything into “one place” (still a bad metaphor), and that a bored kid, a stalker or a journalist can put together, in a matter of minutes, everything traceable back to them by names, public nicknames, IP addresses registered on blogs, public e-mails and the like.

So, yes, this is from the “duh” file.