Activities
Do You Remember...
- the first time you watched color television?
- the 1961 introduction of the IBM Selectric typewriter, with its high-tech erase button?
- your first push button phone in the 1960’s?
- your first remote control television set?
- Pong, the first video game?
- Sony’s now obsolete Betamax video format of the late 1970’s?
- the early mobile phones that required a suitcase to carry around?
- when you first started buying CDs instead of vinyl records or cassettes?
If you said “yes” to any one of these questions, then you are a “Digital Immigrant,” meaning you grew up in the pre-Digital age. Our students today are Digital Natives. Their brains are being wired via technology. Read more about this in Dr. Gary Small’s and Gigi Vorgan’s book, iBrain, Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind:
“The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains. Daily exposure to high technology—computers, smart phones, video games, search engines like Google and Yahoo—stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones” (1).
Susan Lovelace E-mail: [email protected]