a reflection: digital residents&digital visitors.

As a topic that I had never heard of before, the debate surrounding the terms Digital Visitor, Resident, Immigrant and Native proved really interesting for me. I began by looking into Prensky’s theory of Digital Immigrants and Natives and whilst I agreed with some of his points, I began to find flaws in his arguments, which were reflected in further readings that I came across. White and Le Cornu’s proposal of the Digital Visitor and Resident idea really appealed to me as it suggested that there was a continuum, that you could be both at the same time depending on your use of the internet.

One thing that really stood out to me in completing my first couple of weeks of this module was being able to see my peers’ take on this idea. Reading others’ blog posts brought up new approaches to the debate which I hadn’t previously thought of. The comments section on Pippa’s contribution was particularly interesting as Charlie suggested that if White states that an internet user can be both a visitor and a resident, are these terms actually effective in their use? He continued that if you can be both, was there any point in using the concepts? In spite of this, as I commented on Lucy’s blog post on the topic, I wondered whether one could be completely a digital resident, as White and Le Cornu claim that to be a digital visitor you would not necessarily use the internet in the most efficient way to get a job done, from which I inferred that digital residents would always be able find the most effective tool to complete a task.

To conclude, I look forward to future topics and will aim to participate more in the comments sections of my peers’ blogs as I have found reading others’ discussions really quite engaging.