Digital Immigrant

I am most definitely a digital immigrant, and it looks like this class is going to speed up my immigration to the digital world. When I was in high school the internet was just gaining popularity and I thought email was pretty cool and Microsoft Word sure beat typing papers on a typewriter. Other than that I didn't take much interest. I partly blame this on the fact that my little brother was absolutely enamored with computers so I didn't need to learn anything about them, he would happily (and sometimes grudgingly) do any tech-y things I needed done. He is a Network Engineer now and the trend has continued. In fact, he embedded a video for me in the Powerpoint presentation I did today (my very first experience with Powerpoint).
My high school was not very high-tech, I was an editor for our school newspaper and we did all the pages by hand. Cutting and pasting them meant scissors and glue. In college, although I went to a big school, I don't remember any technology being implemented into my classes. I remember one video class where the professor recorded himself giving all the lectures and we all had to go watch them in an auditorium style classroom, but I think he was just lazy rather than cutting edge. I am sure there were more resources available to me had I taken the time to find them and learn how to use them. Shoot I have had a Blackberry for almost a year and I still don't know how to post a picture from it to facebook.
I thought it was interesting that the first Pensky article seemed to assume that all teachers were digital immigrants, because there are definitely some natives in our class. And those natives will have an edge on me, because as Pensky said "I am not sure which is actually harder - "learning new stuff" or "learning new ways to do old stuff". I suspect it is the latter." I agree. It is like learning any new language, the younger you start the easier it is to pick up. But I fully intend to try to catch up.
Another interesting thing I gleaned from the article was the idea of "edutainment" (Pensky). I understand the concept of speaking the language that the students know and respond to, I guess I am just sorry that I missed out on classes in which the teachers sought to entertain me while teaching! But the opportunities for us to integrate technology into our teaching are everywhere, and I definitely think we will reach more students if we use them.
I was really interested in the statistics given in the video, particularly that there are 2.7 million google searches per month (T4 video). Who were people asking these questions to before google? Chances are, most of those questions weren't being asked when the technology wasn't available to give a quick and easy answer. Does that mean we are smarter now because we ask more questions? The other stat that struck me was the one that said that the average student only gets to ask one question every 10 hours. That statistician has obviously never observed our class!