week 9

a) The oldest digital native I know would have to be my uncle who is 49 (or something like that). He is very computer literate and for as long as I have known been using it. He has set up our family website tracing our family tree and invited many distant family members to join and also has set up many businesses online.

b) The youngest digital immigrant I know is my 13 year old cousin who has just moved here from a small town in Egypt. They did not even have a computer, let alone the internet there and he is finding it very difficult to incorporate the whole concept of the internet into his life.

c) My friend most threatens the notion of digital immigrant/native as he is very computer literate and is quick to find anything on the net however he likes to send mail through post and print off files that would be fine left on the computer which would suggest that he has an 'accent'. He holds characteristics of both a digital native and a digital immigrant.

d) The neo-luddite would have difficulty getting to uni in the first place as he would have to either walk or find a horse and carriage as he is scared of the mechanical beasts known as cars and trains. firstly at uni he have trouble enrolling without his enrollment timetable which you get online. In addition finding out his timetable at uni would be difficult as without being able to log in to his uni account he would have to go to student support. When he gets to his lesson and people form groups, he has no mobile number or email address to exchange with anyone so he exchanges address so that he can visit his group member without warning (which they won't be too impressed with). When assessment are due although he excells in exams he gets marked down for handwriting his essays and only using books as references without online journals which are more recently updated. In failing his first couple essays he is dishearted and realises that uni will be impossible for him without making some drastic changes.

e) A technophile in 2020 will have serious health issues due to lack of excercise due to the fact that every aspect of his life will involve sitting infront of his computer screen. With access to everything needed online he will be satisfied with never leaving his chair. The only excercise he will get is walking from his bed to the shower and the shower to his computer chair in the morning followed by the walk back from his computer to his bed. Every aspect of his life will revolve around the net including people delivering his food and work.

Web 3.0

Aswell as the semantic web, web 3.0 suggests all things to do with making the internet easier to use and access. This would include user identity, such as remembering users and having a single passwords for all applications associated with the net, and the access of the internet from anywhere. We are already seeing the latter come into circulation with internet access available in sky, games consoles and mobile phones. Rather than finding the differences between the semantic web and web 3.0 i see the semantic web being a feature of web 3.0 which is the total advancement of the internet as a whole.

The Semantic Web

The semantic web is an extension of the web which involes computers being able to understand information over the internet in order to aid people in achieving their requests. Rather than relying on human interferance, the semantic web makes it possible for machines to find exactly what we are looking for without us having to scan read loads of websites ourselves. This would make researching on the internet much easier as instead of typing in out queries into google then having to scan through the results, we would just have to type what we want and the internet would find it for us.

The Problem with education when its made too easy.

Education is made to teach children skills which would be vital to and greatly benefit them later in life. If unchallenged, these key skills needed would be forgotten or not considered important. If everyone could pass exams with A grades easily, rather than being a great achievment, it would be considered the ordinary and with the same qualifications as everyone else it would be hard to distinguish people from one anohter. Over the years GCSEs have been getting easier and eaier in order to try and get the biggest amount of good grades from schools however no one seemed too bothered about how this would effect the children, The headmaster of a private school in manchester said, 'The view within is that the new GCSEs will present even less of a challenge to the more able candidates than at present'. This implies that these GCSEs are encouraging some children not to work hard as they can get the best grades with a minimum effort. 'Manchester grammar school is to drop the government's GCSEs in all subjects apart from art and replace them with the International GCSE (IGCSE), an alternative more similar to the traditional O-levels.', This shows us that the people at This school have acknowleged there is a problem and are trying to re introduce harder, more challenging exams. Also the fact that failed exams and essays can easily be retaken again and again which questions the structure of the school system as how can these qualifications be taken seriously if they are easily obtainable by everyone. It is a backwards society we live in that tackles the problem of low grades, not by increasing the levels of education or by introducing new learning methods, but by making exams easier to pass.

Quotes taken from Guardian Article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/04/private-schools-gcses-manchester-grammarschool

Should education 'stretch' a person?

I think by 'Stretch' you mean should someone be challenged to use their full ability. I think education should stretch you as if you don't prepare for the worst when you are young then you would never be able to cope with problems later in life. By stretching children, we encourage them to perform to the best of there ability, whether at school, work or even in hobbies otherwise we would be a society filled with people not acheiving their full potential in life.

Disagreements

Article 1: I feel that this is far too brief and rather than approuch the subject of effects caused by over use of facebook, it talks about why they use it.

Article 2: I feel that this was a very well written article and dealt with a wide variety of issues with the topic however, it was not indepth enough as just as they started to crack the suface of a subject they moved on to the next.

Article 3: I liked this article more than the others as i feel it dealt with the topic I was researching. However like the previous article, it was trying to deal with too much and consequently ended up having a little bit about a vast variety of topics.

Digital Divide

The Digital Divide refers to the usage of technological resourses within a society (such as the internet) and the unequal divide in the people who have access to them.

a) This issue of digital immigrants and natives only affects those who have access to the internet within a society as others who cannot affors the privilage of the internet have no access to the digital world. Therefore even though someone can be born and grow up in the digital age, without easy access to the vital resources, they would not be considered a digital native. So although the majority of people within our society have some, if not limited, access to this technology, those without lack the same opportunities as the rest of us and as they don't, their children won't and this cycle continues widening the digital divide.

b) Like within our society, the whole world has a digital divide except on a much greater scale.

This image is from the United Nations Global Development Goals Indicators.

The numbers are a bit blurry but the darker the colour, the more computers there are in that certain area. As you can see here, the digital divide is huge and is evenly spread throughout as there are just as many places with little amounts of computers as there are with lots. Africa has less computers now than the western world did 10 years ago. This suggests that as we, as a world, progress and become more reliant on technology, some places in the world seem to be regressing due to the lack of advancment.