Over on a mailing list of Second Life educators, there is another long discussion about Digital Natives. It actually started off with a great discussion, asking for ‘OLD digital natives’ to come forward and identify themselves. The discussion has been fascinating as digital natives older than myself have come forward and talked about their work on the IBM 7070 years ago and their work today on iPhones.

This illustrates a very important idea about Digital Natives. I read various people complaining about the whole idea Digital Natives and their complaints are mostly that they run into youth who are not digitally savvy while they themselves are digitally savvy. My understanding of the discussion of Digital Natives is that it has nothing to do with age, and everything to do with whether or not a person has ‘grown up digitally’.

While I’m way too old to be considered a Digital Native by those who somehow think that being a digital native means being born after a certain arbitrary date, I ‘grew up digitally’, and consider myself a Digital Native. Beyond that, as being one of the older Digital Natives, I like to call myself a Digital Aborigine.

This raises an interesting question. What do Digital Aborigines teach their young? I should note that I’ve read some literature on education, but I’m more of a programmer than a professional educator. I believe that much of my pedagogical style can probably be traced back to ideas like resource based learning, constructivism, and other educational ideas, that’s not especially how I think about things.

So, what do I teach my kids? I always told my two older daughters, they were free to play any computer game that they could write. They started working in Logo. Wrote programs in MOOs and even did a little with Basic. I never held it as a hard and fast rule, but it did give them a much different perspective on games, and perhaps, on the way they put their thoughts together.

As technology changes, so do the approaches. At one point, I started my youngest daughter, Fiona using Google SketchUp. She created some three-dimensional objects and made them pretty colors. I’ve been encouraging her to do a little bit of work with photographs and visual editing tools. So far, it has been pretty simple stuff, red-eye removal, cropping, scaling, and related ideas. We’ll get into more interesting stuff later on.

Today, she is home from school with a cold. After the morning quota of PBSKids, Fiona went to the computer. She started playing some Dora the Explorer game on the computer, so I presented her with the rule I had told her older sisters. Then, I set her down in front of MSWLogo, a windows version of the Logo programming language.

I showed her the simple aspects. To make the turtle go forward, you type FD and some number for the number of steps. To make the turtle turn, you type RT and how far you want the turtle to turn. We made a few shapes together. Then, I introduced REPEAT.

She was very happy running commands like REPEAT 7596 [ FD 9438 RT 7539 ]. These commands produced Jackson Pollock like images which she found very interesting. I could now return to my other work.

I sent out a message about her starting to work in Logo, and I received a response from another online friend. While I don’t know the early history of this friend, I suspect that, he too, is a digital aborigine. He asked the question, “Do you have any particular strategies for teaching kids programming?” He went on to talk about the difficulty we digital aborigines have when we show our kids programming.

Programming is so interesting and exciting; it is hard not to push. It is hard not to push. It is hard not to present too much information all at once.

So, I presented her Fiona very small bits of what she could do, until she was hooked and was saying things like, “Oh, cool” or “Awesome”. Then, I handed over the keyboard to her at let her run with it. Every so often, she would come back and ask me questions. Some, I deferred for a later day. Others I answered and gave her enough to keep her interested.

As a general rule, and I suspect that all of the educational theorists will talk about this in terms of resource based learning, I like to give her the tools to play with and see what she creates. However, at some points, it is useful to have a goal. So, following an example I saw from some logo programming book years ago, I drew a simple pattern and asked her to get the turtle to draw it. It is actually a big challenge for her, and she has been working on it for a while. She comes back to me every so often with questions, but she has almost completed the task.

Mixing this together with things like doing an Internet based Radio show, Fiona is building a groundwork to create some very interesting things in something like OpenSim, and I look forward to seeing what she might create sometime.

However, I haven’t been doing this as part of a conscious plan to build up right selection of tools. Instead, I present tools to her based on whatever I think she might find interesting in the moment.

I don’t know if I’m a typical digital aboriginal parent, and I would love to hear thoughts from other digital aboriginal parents about what they are teaching their younger children.