SECOND BLOG REFLECTION

“Messaging, Gaming, Peer-to-peer Sharing:
Language Learning Strategies & Tools for the Millennial Generation”
Robert Godwin-Jones
Virginia Comonwealth University
January 2005, Volume 9, Number 1
pp. 17-22

The text begins defining two concepts: “Digital Natives” who are the young people who have born in the last years and who have a close and natural relation with technology and “Digital Immigrants” who are the people, older than natives, who try to work with technology but is not something natural to them, they did not born surrounded by technology as “Natives”. Clarifying these concepts the author begins a revision of some of the latest and more popular devices and programs and makes some comments in the use and utility of them in language learning. Instant Messaging and Mobile Communication, Peer-to-Peer networking and the iPod Phenomenon and Gaming are described and analyzed in this article.

The concepts of "Digital Natives “and "Digital Immigrants" caught my attention I think that this is a reality we as teacher can avoid, many times our students are one step beyond or knowledge in technology. I think that we as immigrants have to make the effort to be updated always because the different technological devices can help to our work and also because our students live in an environment surrounded by technology. Even though there still so many teachers who are afraid of working with computers and prefer to work more “traditionally”.

The other important idea that I rescue from this text is the existence of a "third space”, which is not the school and neither the house that is there for us as teachers to exploit. In this space our students feel comfortable and spend a lot of time developing important skills. "Sites for socially and materially distributed cognition, complex problem solving, identity work, individual and collaborative learning across multiple multimedia, multimodality 'attentional spaces' (Lemke, n.d.), and rich meaning-making and, as such, ought to be part of the educational research agenda"