Digital Immigrants

I read another interesting commentary recently.  The author, Shirly Duglin Kennedy, provided some cogent, pithy thoughts on social networking and the citizens who comprise this segment of the digital community.  She discussed the impact of technology on older and younger workers, some pertinent demographics on social networking participants, and made reference to digital natives (you know, the generation that's grown up with all this wonderful digital technology) and the digital immigrants (you know, those who grew up speaking analog but learned to speak digital out of necessity).  Kennedy makes an excellent point that just because some new technology or application is, well, new, does not necessarily mean that it has any application at all.  That's brings us to the tie-in between any technology and its importance to e-learning.  While technology can certainly make our lives easier to manage and can keep us connected in ways so far removed from the 1800s Pony Express as to be almost unimaginable, we need to make sure that any technology we use to deliver our e-message is the right application for the right audience at the right time.  And with that responsibility comes the requirement that we need to know how to use the technology, be we 'immigrants' or 'natives.'

Here's the link to where you can either read the abstract or purchase Kennedy's article in Information Today:  http://tinyurl.com/ykw97ul.  If you don't choose to buy the article, here's a link to a site she references that provides robust social networking demographics and data--I recommend bookmarking this one:  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/11/a-collection-of-soical-network-stats-for-2009/