“Do you have a check? You could pay in a check.”

“Do you have a check? You could pay in a check.”, I scratched my head as I stood at the counter. Check… Check… I vaguely remembered seeing an unused checkbook tossed carelessly in the trunk of my car that morning. But even if I could locate it, I couldn’t be sure it was in the right sequence. Or that I could even remember how to use the darn thing.”, said Carie Windham

As I said before, I really feel myself as an immigrant not just here in the United States, but also a digital immigrant everywhere, as described by Prensky, because definitly I don’t speak “fluently” the same “language” of the Net Geners, as Carie Windham described so well in her article. It’s not just their “language” that is different, their experiences, their concepts, their daily life are so different from mine that it makes our perspective at least a little diverse. For me, the technology is really an up to date tool that can help me to reach my goals more easily, but differently from the Net Geners I know what is life without all these technologies (I know how to use a check book, rsrsr), I don’t take them for granted. Like the Net Geners, I really enjoy what the technology can do for me, for my work, for my grad studies and for my daily life, but in order to enjoy it I have to “learn” this new language, try to use it as much as possible to become more fluent… it’s a hard but at the end rewarding work.

I agree with them when we talk about on-line courses, if the course is not engaging and challenging, it’s just a matter of difference of the physical space where you are taking the course, with one more negative point for the on-line course: you don’t have the peer’s interaction as you could have in a “boring” traditional course.

So, for me technology is a wonderful and engaging tool that can really make a lesson more interactive and interesting, but the teacher role is always very crucial to achieve that, without his knowledge and creativity, you can have a very “boring” and superficial “high tech” course. I really agree with most of their wishes of more moderate use of technology in the classroom, the only thing is that, I can also really appreciate a brilliant but “boring” traditional lecture, because I’m fluent in that language.