Week 9: Threatening the notion of digital natives & immigrants

I feel my work colleague Sue is a person best known to me who questions/threatens the notion of digital natives and immigrants in society.

Sue is 49 and a Senior Pharmaceutical Dispenser for Boots. Even though she is 49 she has a good knowledge with the basics of Web 2.0. When she first began training to be a dispenser all of her exams were, labels on medicine bottles, and ordering/filing records were all hand written. However as society has developed so has her knowledge and understanding of learning. As with most aspects of working for a company like boots, staff training is continuous even if you have a particular status in the business. Most training materials now are computer based which has made Sue interact with computers more than she thought she would. Also labels and ordering in the pharmacy are now computerised but she still uses her old fashioned method of filing cabinets instead of folders on a computer desktop as sometimes computers can be seen as 'too complicated'. She also uses special pharmaceutical software on the pgarmacy computers. This software is complex and it takes a whilst to get a grasp of. Sue however knows this software inside out and teaches younger assisstants how to work this software. This could question Prensky's idea of immigrants and natives as aaccording to him an immigrant would be 'older' and have to learn something, where as in Sue's case she would be the native of the software who would be teaching people like me or other assisstants so we could be seen as 'immigrants'
ourselves.
She sends E-mails, joins online conferences and blogs and knows how to create word documents online but in some cases still prefers to write her own letters and write on pen and paper. She shops on the internet and looks for holidays on there too but also enjoys the ideas of browsing around the shops in town, and always books her flights from a travel agents rather than an online site. Perhaps because she spends so much time in her job talking to members of the public face to face etc that she too enjoys meatspace interaction. She also has a mobile phone and appears to text quite a bit she also has now signed up to Facebook and is getting to grips with both Mobile phones and Facebook to enhance her abilities. Sue has always acted very young which is perhaps a reason why she likes to keep up with the new technology. I do admire her for trying these new appliances, as she’s always been once to ‘jump in at the deep end’ so to speak. I think it is good that she is able to combine traditional and new technologies to things to work how she wants them to. From what I’ve noticed with her particular generation, many of them are combining the two areas like Sue and trying to get to grips with these new technologies as well as enjoying the ‘old’ ways.