Week 9 - Blog - Oldest Digital Native

The oldest digital immigrant I know is my dad.
He was the first person a lot of our friends remember as having he internet. This would have been in the 1990's when it basically was just words on a screen, no pictures, hyperlinks as we now know the internet.
As a child I always remember having a computer in the house and playing really old computer games with pretty rubbish graphics compared to what we have now. My favourite was Donald Ducks Alphabet Chase - http://www.mobygames.com/game/donalds-alphabet-chase

My dad works with machines and computers quite a bit as his work involved a lot of printing and graphics and editting.
He has also had a mobile phone when I was very small, I remember because it was practically the size of me!! But even now, he's always getting the latest phones. He's had about 4 ipods - 2 classics, 1 nano and itouch.
He is constantly connected to his mobile and his emails. Even though he is so into all this and can work it he doesn't understand how to work it to it's full potential.
For example, all the different settings on phones - I have to help him with.
Or knowing that he could get email updates on his phone - my brother informed him of this.
I had to tell him he could make playlists on his ipods. Things like this show that although different generations use digital media in different ways and for different things, age does not generally define Prensky's notion of digital immigrants or digital natives.
It is also true that we can learn from eachother as different generations will look at things in different ways. For example, my dad can do all the simple things and sometimes has to help me, but I go straight for the complicaed things just because I know they exist and there is a way of doing them and I can challenge myself to figure out. But when my dad tries to do these he gets completely baffled, even after I've explained, it takes him a while to understand it.