Lankshear and Knobel on two divergent mindsets

The first mindset [newcomer/outsider] assumed that the contemporary world is essentially the way it has been throughout the modern-industrial period, only now it is more technologized or, alternatively, technologized in a new and very sophisticated way. To all intents and purposes, however, the world on which these new technologies are brought to bear is more or less the same economic, cultural, social world that has evolved throughout the modern era, where things got done by means of routines that were predicated on long-standing assumptions about bodies, materials, property and forms of ownership, industrial techniques and principles, physical texts, face-to-face dealings (and physical proxies for them), and so on.  The second mindset [insider] assumes that the contemporary world is different in important ways from the world we have known, and that the difference is growing. This is related to the development of new digital electronic internetworked technologies and new ways of doing things and new ways of being that are enabled by these technologies. (Lankshear and Knobel 2006: 33-4)

References

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning. Maidenhead: Open University Press.