This morning I struggled out of bed, got dressed and rushed out the door so that I could attend my first Hot Topic breakfast at 7.30 am by Marc Prensky on “Innovative Solutions for Increasing Demands”. No surprises – but guess who was late 🙂 – fortunately you get to eat breakfast first.

I was really excited about going to listen to Marc speak because Ray Tuckey from Great Southern TAFE bases his strategy for increasing e-learning in his College on Marc’s digital natives, digital immigrants. Ray’s philosophy is to do whatever it takes to put technology into the hands of his lecturers (e.g. give them PDA to assist with their work). By giving them tools that increase their digital literacy his goal is to decrease the divide between his lecturers (i.e. digital immigrants – those of us who were not born into the digital world) and the students (i.e. digital natives – generation that has grown up in the digital age). Ultimately help the immigrant lecturers (who speak a different language due to totally different life experiences) relate and teach the native students more effectively.

Some of the information Marc covered included:

• He believes that the key literacy for the 21st Century is programming
• Digital Native are use me or lose me – so we must value every employees contribution from day 1 – encourage innovation and change
• Engage me or enrage me – I am not listening is approximately a third of our students
• For the digital native community now is the World
• We are experiencing an era of incredible change – technological developments are going faster