Musings of a Digital Immigrant

There's no question about it. I am definitely a digital immigrant. Why, for my first few years working in the library at UNC-Chapel Hill, the fanciest piece of technology that we used was a microfiche reader. While I was there, the cataloging department got its first OCLC terminal. The reference librarians were allowed to look at it during a scheduled tour, but we were strictly not to touch it!

Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Athens in 1976, and there was an OCLC terminal that the public could use!

And in the almost 28 years that I've worked in Alden, things have changed drastically. In my first position in 1979, my typewriter wasn't even electric! But by 1987, that was quite different. I started doing online searching, and we got our first CD-ROM. Of course, then the web came along, and our roller coaster ride with technology has never stopped. Virtual reference is especially something that I've enjoyed growing with.

So I am a digital immigrant. And I certainly have many of those characteristics. Most of all, I view technology as a tool. If it can make life easier for me or for our patrons, I love it. Using software to balance my checkbook or schedule a meeting is great. Searching for information is so, so, so much easier than it used to be (although it's nearly impossible to keep up with all of the sources that are potentially useful.) And I love Flickr! I had already started to use it before this summer, but I've learned a lot more about it this week.

Another thing that makes me a technology immigrant is that I don't love playing with technology just for the heck of it. I have to know that I'll need it before I'm willing to take the time to learn it. I do appreciate my younger colleagues who experiment with new technologies before it's clear how they'll be useful!

Now here's the rub. Often, when you hear people talk about digital immigrants and digital natives, there's an assumption that digital natives know more about technology than digital immigrants. Now generally they do know more about social networking software, but I don't find that our undergraduates are necessarily the technology whizzes that popular opinion would have us believe. So that's the piece of the digital immigrant/digital native lore that grates on my nerves sometimes!

So maybe it's more complicated than that. Here's another way to look at it:

A Picture from my Flickr Family History Collection

Oystein Nilsen Bratland and Kari Torkelsdatter Gauten Hegerland
Originally uploaded by wanda_weinberg

Here's a story about this picture which was taken in Norway in about 1877.

In 2001, my sister and I visited Norway to find the farms from which our family emigrated. My grandfather's family had left Roldal Norway when he was two years old, so that's one of the places we wanted to see. Now Roldal is a small town in the mountains in Norway, and the farms of his parents and grandparents were several miles outside of that small town, so you can begin to imagine how remote this place was.

My sister, who is the braver of the two of us, didn't hesitate to walk right up to these farms to introduce ourselves and explain why we were there. Most Norwegians speak English so this generally worked, but on one farm, the woman only spoke a rural dialect of Norwegian, so we really had no way of communicating with her. We did have a genealogy of the family with us though, so my sister opened it to the page which had a picture of her farm and pictures of two sets of our great-great-grandparents who had lived in Roldal. The woman looked very surprised and pulled us into her house where she showed us the originals on her wall!

The picture in the genealogy was just a photocopy of the original, so it wasn't a very good quality. Earlier this year, I decided to contact the author of this genealogy to see if I could get copies of this and other pictures. I had never met this second cousin, but she's been very kind and has sent scanned copies of several wonderful nineteenth century photos.

By the way, I used the "Blog This" option to send this picture to Flickr.

7 ½ Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners

Probably the habit that I'm least likely to use is the Habit 1: Begin with the end in mind. I think that is because I rarely start with a large learning task in mind. My lifelong learning tends to be daily incremental tasks that can be accomplished in small chunks.

The easiest habit for me is Habit 7: Teach/mentor others That's what I do for a living!