At PodCampNYC last week, there was a lot of focus on the role of podcasting and other social media on education. The old discussion about the digital natives and digital immigrants popped up here and there and stimulated a lot of thinking.

For those of you not acquainted with the idea of a digital native, it is simply, those people who have grown up in a world where there has always been the Internet. Digital natives grow up communicating with their friends via IMs, Facebook, MySpace, text messaging. It is the way they have learned to communicate, just as other generations have grown up with telephones, television, radio, etc.

The digital immigrants are the older people that have come to digital communications technology later in their life. They weren’t born into a digital culture, they moved into it. This is producing a digital generation gap, where digital natives and digital immigrants look at online culture from very different points of view.

There are problems with looking at things this way. While I recent Pew report says that 94% of teenagers are online, there are some that are not, and there are others, that while being online, may not have become immersed in digital culture. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who have been online for many years. I started programming computers in the 1960s and first connected to the Internet in the early 1980s.

Peggy Sheehy of the Suffern Middle School in Second Life, spoke about this in terms of ‘shifted learners’. Some people, both young and old have made the shift to digital culture. Others have not. This, of course, leads to plenty of plays on words about shiftless learners or shifty teachers.

Shifted learners may be a better way of looking at the new digital generation gap, but I still like the idea of a digital natives and digital immigrants.

Christine Cavalier lead a great session on social media parenting, where she explored the digital generation gap. She suggested looking at things in terms of teaching technology, or digital culture as a foreign language, similar to the way we teach English as a Foreign Language to immigrants to our country. As I listened to her talk, images of immigrant parents talking amongst themselves came to my mind, “Oh no, my child is dating a digital native!”

In a different session, John Herman pointed out Having Our Say which captures quite nicely the voice of some digital natives. As an aside, it is best viewed in the context of Did You Know 2.0.

Yet in all of this, I come back to trying to understand my own role. Perhaps I can best be thought of as a digital aborigine, or as one person suggested when I used that phrase, digital indigenous.

I’m not all that versed on various indigenous or aborigine cultures, but it seems like this could be a useful metaphor. Sure, there are the big name digital aborigines, those who have become A-list bloggers and A-list Twitterers. Some of them might be thought of as the great aboriginal warriors that everyone learns about during their brief study of aborigine culture. There are the aborigines that cooperate with the settlers and try to make their fortune off of the settlers. Yet there are many other aboriginal people.

Perhaps, I feel most akin to the shamans. I remember, with a smile, the uucp bang paths that were part of the early songlines of our digital culture. I speak to others about how to use knowledge of digital culture to make cyberspace a better place. I worry about the rabbit proof fences that add to a digital divide and thwart net neutrality.

So, I sat in Christine’s session, where she spoke wisely about trying help digital immigrants feel less afraid of the digital culture they were finding themselves amidst, and felt very out of place. I sent out my messages on Twitter as I listened to people talk about managing reputations online. It felt like some of the digital immigrants were getting Christine’s message and were trying to ratchet back their fears. They spoke about seeking for better ways of talking to children about how pictures from parties where the kids were drinking might hurt them later on in life.

I spoke about whether or not a ‘C’ student at Yale, known for serious partying, could ever become President of the United States. I’m not sure how many people got the reference. I touched on the idea of ‘reputational bankruptcy’, the ability to say, yes, I did some wild and stupid things when I was younger, but I’ve grown and learned from it. I’m not sure how much people get the idea of ‘reputational bankruptcy’ yet.

So, I tried a different tack. I asked who knew about Tori Lindsey. No one recognized the name. However, when I started to describe the story, it rang bells. It reflected a very different way that digital natives look at the Internet. Tori was beaten because she was ‘talking trash’ on MySpace and because the perpetrators wanted to create a viral video.

It was interesting to hear the reactions; they made me feel even more like the outsider digital aborigine. The best comment was from John Herman who talked about the incident with one of his classes. He spoke about how all his students spoke about what the perpetrators had done wrong was to video tape the beating. Finally, one of his students spoke up and said, no, what they did wrong was beat up a student.

Does this tell us something about how kids are thinking about the Internet? I would have loved to listen in on John’s class as they discussed this.

Today, PurpleCar twittered about a blog post by DaveLaMorte about the session. It is interesting to read his comments.

Aldon Hynes, talked about the dangers of social networking as a tool for bullying and abuse... Aldon talked about how a lack of proper modeling/teaching/supervision led to the assalt/video and how it had the potential to ruin the lives of everyone involved because these kids didn't understand to scope of their actions and the permanence of the Internet.

Yes, that is the way I would expect a digital immigrant to hear it. It goes back to the fear of what digital culture means. People hearing what I said, in this context just make me want to bang my head on the keyboard.

However, Dave went on to say,

It was at the moment that I realized that most of the people in the room not only spoke a different "technological language" than many young people, but that we are not even part of the same paradigm. Aldon's comments made me realize that kids are operating under different social codes, norms, and perspectives about how to use social media/networking/the Interwebs.

YES! That is the point exactly! Thank you, Dave. He points to Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten. Vanessa talks about providing a Gen Y perspective on Teens and Parents. It looks like another blog I need to add to my RSS feed.

PurpleCar added a great comment to Dave’s blog post about the role of ‘micro celebrity’ as well which is worth exploring.

Meanwhile, I will be talking with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. Here are my initial thoughts on this:

"This is what Fiona's daddy does." What do I do? I help people tell their stories safely on the Internet. I'll talk about how sometimes we write our stories. Some times we show our stories with pictures or movies. Sometimes, we even tell our stories over the telephone or record them. We can use computers to tell our stories. We can use cellphones to tell our stories. Our cellphones can take pictures. Our cellphones can be used to make movies. We can even make movies using computer games.

Perhaps this raises issues about what it is like to be the child of a digital aborigine, but that is a whole different topic.

So, I am starting explore what it means to be a digital aborigine, particularly with a shamanistic leaning. Let’s see what sort of discussion we can generate.