"Emergent" Meanings

The digital natives quiz was interesting to me because I was intrigued as to what types of things they would discuss. I have been around computers my whole life due to schools and libraries. The only piece of technology I ever hated was a calculator because it stopped people from learning ways to solve problems. Though, thanks to physics and statistics, I have come to terms with the calculator. I think it had more to do with the fact that the first time I was allowed to use one was in high school. The digital natives quiz showed me how much I know about technology that I would have never before thought of when describing what I know. I always wrote down on résumés for office jobs that I was computer and word efficient. I never realized how all the little things like blogging and wiki-ing could really be used as an asset to companies. I love my computer and video games, and never really thought of them as assets that other people don’t understand. I feel like I am one of the kids of technology that you hear about. And, since I have been surrounded by technology since childhood, am considered a digital native. I don’t feel like “emergent” describes my technology experience because technology didn’t come into my life where I would have had to adapt to it. I have always been working with or surrounded by video games, computers, and cell phones.

There are some similarities between Tompkins’ ideas of emergent literacy for children and emergent digital literacy. Tompkins discusses in his book that emergent literacy for children is when they begin to see the importance, purpose, and usefulness of written language. I feel that emergent digital literacy is the same except it happens to people when they are introduced to technology later in life. For us natives, technology has surrounded us and its usefulness and purpose seems apparent. For emergent digital learners, I feel that it is this same process that children go through in Tompkins’ emergent literacy. Both groups are realizing the importance of something and are learning it so they can utilize it. This “emergent” process is similar to how I sometimes see things in class during discussion. I do not always originally see things as important, but then after starting to learn about them, see their value and learn as much as I can. An example is when we learned all the different discussion techniques in class. At first I thought that leading a discussion couldn’t be as complex as the articles made it sound, and that all the authors sounded like they were saying the same thing. After seeing the videos with the teachers reading to students, I wondered how the one teacher could be so ignorant of what she was doing. My reasoning became, “If a seasoned teacher could fall into this trap, then I could to. There must be something important about this discussion thing.” I then reread the articles and paid more attention to what was going on. I could be considered an emergent learner of discussion techniques. Hopefully that makes sense. I would hate to have missed the boat on that one.