DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS IN CONTEMPRARY CLASSROOM
A digital immigrant teacher, teaching digital natives’ students in a computer age classroom
This piece shall focus on digital immigrants’ teachers, their nightmares, and the effect they have on the academic and digital wellbeing of their students and teaching profession. Digital immigrants have been described as people that were born and raised before the advent of digitalization, which literarily implies that they have already developed analogue ways of life. Obviously, they lived a normal life like everyone do in this digital age, in fact the major inventions and world discoveries were product of those age and it have been observed that economy, climate, cost of living, health status, crime rates, and societal harmony were in the normal compared to the present-day experience.
For the sake of this piece, it’s also important to call to mind that there were also great teachers, professors and professor emeritus that has set the pace in the analogue age and are still in practice in this digital age.
Loos E. (2012) in his studies described Digital immigrants as senior citizens who, with much effort can learn to use digital media up to a certain point. The above description is true to a great extent however it’s not consistent with the digital immigrants’ teachers I met in my school days. They were like a man throne into the middle of a sea, so they will always find reasons to avoid the use of digital devises in classroom practice.
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Similarly, Thomas D.W. (2011) Observed that Teachers often feel intimidated by the technologies available to them and simultaneously frustrated by the lack of availability of useful technologies. In spite of the report and recommendations of the National Policy on Education to integrate digital usage in the day-to-day teaching and learning, yet the compliance is farfetched. Olutola, A. T., & Olatoye, O. O. (2015). Identified four major challenges faced by the developing countries while engaging e-learning approach as; Poor internet connections facilities, Lack of digital equipment, high cost of software needed for the design and development of the courses, and inability to train the teachers digital competence.
The above observation is very consistent to my experience as a student. My teachers never mentioned Information Technology (IT) to me through out my basic/primary school, I had a computer teacher in my high school day who taught us some basic things in computer, however I never touch a computer nor feel it; she only drew it on the board. Once upon a time in my undergraduate days a policy came that mandated the lecturers to engage digital devices in their teachings, but majority of them declined the policy owing to their digital illiteracy, while few other hired some tech guys to operate the digital devices while they do the teaching.
They should rather apply same tactics Thomas D.W. (2011) narrated instead of avoiding the digital devices totally.
When we attended high school, some of our teachers were not very proficient users of the 16 millimetre projector, high technology in those days. Did these teachers simply resolve not to show films (this was before the video tape and certainly before the DVD)? No, they did something radical; they asked the students to run the projector.
This is so important because the resultant effect of these digital immigrants refuting to upgrade their digital literacy as recommended by Loos E. (2012) is directly the production of digital immigrant students. Olutola, A. T., & Olatoye, O. O. (2015) Also informed that One of the challenges faced by digital immigrants is inability of teachers to assist the students develop the ability and knowledge necessary to make them use the e-learning devices effectively.
REFERENCES
Loos E. (2012). Senior citizens: Digital immigrants in their own country? Journal, vol.6 – nº1 (2012), 001-023, The Netherlands. 1646- 5954/ERC123483/2012 023
Olutola, A. T., & Olatoye, O. O. (2015). Challenges of E-Learning Technologies in Nigerian University Education. Journal of Educational and Social Research, 5(1), 301. Retrieved from https://www.richtmann.org/journal/index.php/jesr/article/view/5623
Thomas D.W. (2011) A nation of digital immigrants: Four principles. The California Reader Online Vol44,No2_DigitalImmigrants_11.05.10-with-cover-page- v2.pdf (d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net)