Two of the articles I liked one I found extremely offensive!  Maybe I am too embroiled within the subject, since I have taught and believe in technology integration.  I thought Neil Postman had some good points but most of his ideas are the reasons why technology has had such a hard time being integrated.  He makes technology out to be this huge virus infecting our lives that will destroy our culture.  I agree that with new technology there will be old tools that will become archaic and we will simply no longer use them, but to imply technology is like a car which has, “poisoned our air, and choked our cities” is a little extreme.  He also says technology is like the bible or religion where the church believed mass production of the bible would make people more devout since they could read the book themselves.  Mass production back fired because people started to interpret the bible their own way and disagreed with the church’s interpretation.  The idea that people will revolt from learning? From education? I do not know how computers will help us revolt from something, but he never clearly states who we will revolt from.  He assumes there will be a large price to pay for having technology, but his statements have very little facts in them so they seem to me a cautionary tale from a biased person.

Postman also explains that the computer advocates say computers are a great invention but they do not cure “children starving in the world”.  Not many things have cured starving in the world!  The idea that computers are not so great because they do not answer the world’s hunger problem is a tall order to put upon a simple tool.  The author tends to blame technology for many things in the article to prove that it is a false profit or devil figure, but he seems to give the computer too many God-like qualities.

Computers will change everything that is what evolution is all about.  You can either write manifestoes of doom days coming because of technology or you can work with it.  Change has always been hard for our world and there will always be people fighting the change tooth and nail.  The doomsday people can keep fighting but the change will still happen.

I have read Prensky before and find the article very interesting looking at students as “Digital Natives”, but I would rather discuss the article, “Reconsidering Digital Immigrants”.  I have always thought Prensky’s use of students being a new type of learning because they have grown up within a technological world to be very accurate and self confirming for me as a tech teacher.  What I never thought of was the “Immigrant” the older class that is being divided from the students of today.  If we are treating them as immigrants and refusing them access like a native we are creating a huge gap between different learners.  Already some students do not want to help dad “set up an email” or understand, “MySpace”  because adults are shut out of this internet world by the feelings of being inadequate or simply “too slow” to get it.  There is a large chunk of people being cut out of the societal revolution that computers provide.  Maybe technology has had a hard time being assimilated into mainstream learning because schools are asking teachers who feel they do not belong in the tech world already.

At the school level more support needs to be provided to allow teachers and parent’s access to online learning.  Instead of a Us vs. Them it should be a mutual learning environment where our children can teach us.  Isn’t that how immigrants began to learn English?  Learning through their children’s classes. The idea of students teaching adults isn’t such a new concept but an old one.  Instead of looking at technology as a young person’s world it should be looked at as a new world for all.