My Digital Natives

Since I have  read all the various and sundry pieces and watched the videos, it's time for an Experience Piece to link ideas to one family's life:

We got our first computer back in the mid '80s: an Atari that had no hard drive but which accepted BASIC pretty easily. By the time our oldest son was born, we had an IBM clone with a color monitor, and 10 hours of internet a week. I was IT at our house. I became rather good at swapping out parts and chasing down viruses.

By the time our oldest son was ten, he was beginning to take over some of my IT duties. By the time his youngest brother was eight, he had built a computer out of spare parts that were laying around the house. It ran a stripped-down version of Linux and had no RAM because he couldn't find any that fit. The boys began building computers for friends and local small businesses.  All of this more complicated work was done with help from online friends and tech websites.

Since our kids were homeschooled until it was time for college, they were immersed in the online world for more of their education than most. They seem to be much more capable of finding information and distributing it. They can teach themselves nearly anything from a Youtube video or a Google search, and they retain the knowledge very well. They are truly digital natives.

They also have social lives, both on and off line. They have played sports, been in bands, gone to dances, hung around with neighborhood kids. They have formed strong friendships both on and offline.  
They've met many of their online friends - we've had visitors from several US states and Canada that they've known for years only as digital friends. The older ones have plans to travel Europe to meet several of their more distant correspondents. There have been a few negative experiences, but those have been rare.

I have seen some who have withdrawn into the digital existence nearly entirely, but those are the exception, and they are the type of people who probably would have withdrawn into something besides this present reality anyway.  At least the online world offers real interaction with other real people, which is more than anyone can say about books or television, which is what people like that tended to withdraw into before the advent of the internet.

#edcmooc