Dr Kathy Seddon – online learning guru and famous Welsh person (@kathyseddon) recently asked me to tell her everything I know about Twitter.

She called it a ‘brain dump’.

It took some time, as you can imagine.

Later on she described me as a ‘digital gardener’. This is not an expression I had heard before but it struck a bit of a chord so I thought I’d share my thinking and a few questions.

If you have heard this term before, do let me know as I’d like to credit the originator. UPDATE: see the comments below!

GARDENER? CURATOR? IMMIGRANT? RESIDENT?

The debate around the usefulness of terms like ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ has raged for years, as I’m sure you know. Like all labels, these can useful as starting points for debate but don’t stand up to proper analysis. There’s always a risk they will be used as shortcuts to avoid discussing or analysing the real issues.

• “They will be fine with this technology – they’re all digital natives.”
• “We can’t ask them to do that – they are digital immigrants and won’t be able to cope.”

Recently, I have also heard the term ‘curator’ a lot and, once again, it is used with the assumption that all the audience understand what it means – it is used as shorthand. I have to say it seems a bit dry to me.

BETT 2010

At the BETT show in January I took part in a discussion with (amongst others) @daveowhite about digital identity and he introduced me to the concepts of ‘digital residents’ and ‘digital vistors’. As I work in e-learning for adults at the moment this made a lot of sense.

I would classify myself most definitely as a ‘digital resident’ – hence this blog! I work to maintain and develop my online persona via blogging, twitter, posterous, delicious, Moblog, Moby Picture etc. In fact, after seeing @tombarrett ‘s home page I have set up http://everything.mulryne.com to collect a lot of these together. This sounds quite like a gardener, tending plants and creating the right conditions for growth. I tend the places on the web where I reside – I want them to grow and portray me in a positive way- to be a fruitful expression of my (online) personality.

ADULT LEARNERS

However, many (but crucially not all) of the adults I work with are very much ‘digital visitors’ – they like the web, they are not necessarily scared of it but they want to get on, get what they want and then get off again – leaving no trace that they have been there. It reminds me of the way I used the internet way back in the early 90s when I paid by the minute.

So how can we facilitate learning for groups of adults who might be ‘digital residents’ or ‘digital visitors’? What difference does it make? How far down the age range does it go?

Certainly, I’d say that every time I hear someone use one of these terms from now on, I’m going to question exactly what they mean and whether or not it’s just an excuse to avoid the hard work of analysing our audience properly.

Why don’t you do the same?

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