Week 4, Social Bookmarking: Learning to Share

Is there a halfway point between the digital immigrant and digital native categories? I feel like I should be considered a digital native…maybe because of my age, because I’ve been using some sort of a computer since I was 8, because I was competent enough in Word and Excel to get through university and also work part time in a handful of offices on campus. I feel like this “technology thing,” as Kim put it, is not totally foreign to me. But my family’s first computer was the kind that had an all black screen with a blinking green cursor and you had to type in some sort of weird code or insert a flimsy disk whenever you wanted to play a game. We never used the computer to actually type anything, and internet certainly wasn’t available yet. I eventually became relatively competent with both computers and the internet, but then between finishing undergrad in 2005 and starting grad school in 2011, I never once opened Microsoft Word or used the internet for academic research. Six years, and I honestly feel like I’m starting over! Maybe I’m like a first generation digital native coming from a digital immigrant family who never fully embraced or adapted to the new culture?

I had never heard of Diigo, Delicious or the idea of social bookmarking until our very first Skype call in this class. Even though I haven’t had much chance to experiment with it yet, it’s hard not to recognize the potential of these sorts of tools. Working alone, I could save hours of research and prep time (literally hours, as I am possibly the most meticulously inefficient note taker in the world…) by highlighting and commenting directly on websites instead of trying to organize and keep track of everything in notebooks. Group projects would no longer have to involve coordinating schedules for face to face meetings or long and confusing phone calls where you try to make sure that you’re both actually looking at and talking about the same thing on your screen. Social bookmarking is one of those things that I wish I had invented (right up there with ebooks, Nike+, car seat warmers and waterproof mascara), because it’s a quietly brilliant idea that makes you think how and why did I ever live without this?!

This is kind of how I felt when I found out about Google docs for the first time last fall. My lifestyle is annoyingly nomadic, and I always end up doing homework in random places at random times with an unpredictable amount of resources. Opening up a friend’s computer to put finishing touches on a paper that was due the following day, only to find that they didn’t have Microsoft Office installed was always a treat. Google docs has really changed my life as a student for the better. Being able to access my work from any computer with internet is a huge convenience, and I like the universality of it. If I can send and receive an email from anywhere in the world, why can’t I use the same technology to work on homework, complete group projects or just do some simple independent research with a little continuity?