In today's world there are now two kinds of learners: "digital immigrants" and "digital natives."
Digital immigrants came of age before technology revolutionized learning, and they often struggle to adapt to new rituals and protocol.
Digital natives instinctively adapt to technology and expect it to be available to assist them in the ways they find most appropriate for their specific needs.
Texting is one example of the divide that exists between digital immigrants and digital natives.
The United States lags behind most of the industrialized world when it comes to texting. There were about 176 million texts sent between cell phones in the United States last year. Next year that number will increase to 1.5 billion. By comparison, there are an estimated 30 billion messages exchanged every month in Europe.
The Chinese, who embraced this technology years before it arrived here, send over 300 billion text messages a year. Half the 13- to 15-year-olds in Australia own cellphones. In Japan, texting is so prevalent that Japanese teenagers are called the "tribe of the thumb."
As learning professionals, we must assess how technology transforms the way digital natives communicate, and analyze whether or not we should integrate new communication channels into our learning interventions. If so, we must also design to enable digital immigrants to grasp the new delivery method.
Why is texting a potential useful tool for learning? Consider this:
- Texting is perfect for viral messaging to specific audiences, especially those that may not have high-bandwidth internet connections.
- Texting works great for short messaging, including reminders of important events such as the availability of new learning objects, upcoming classes, and key nuggets of information.
- Texting can also be used to query web services, such as Twitter. One useful application is to obtain an instant weather or traffic report. For learning, simple queries could offer true on-the-job performance support, i.e., send a direct query to a content object for a reply to a CLI command, a price quote during a sales inquiry, or a status on the availability of an offering.
More than likely texting may have a short life-span, especially as portable devices focus on ease of e-mailing. For example, Apple stressed e-mailing in its iPhone instead of multimedia messaging.
The broader lesson for us to grasp is the ability to leverage communication channels effectively to ensure we can offer information in a suitable format for digital natives, while also supporting the transitioning digital immigrants.
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