60 ms·

The digital native is a myth

189 points by okket 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Compare to an excellent report from the trenches: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co.... A very good read.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  I'm glad that things "just work" for the most part and you don't have to think about them But at the same time these are unnerving. It's not about "not knowing how to use computers" it's about NOT READING WHAT'S IN PLAIN SIGHT
  - vacri 9y ago
    once when I was working support, I needed a client to read back to me the contents of an error box - it could only be one of two boxes. She said the content was something else ("the files are corrupt"), which wouldn't happen in that part of the workflow (and wouldn't make sense at that point anyway). I got her to read back the error dialogue word-by-word. She still just made it up ("the. files. are. corrupt."). It wasn't until I got her to read out the error message letter by letter that I found out what it actually said and was able to help her...
- narrator 9y ago
  This was kind of painful to read. The author's tech arrogance is extreme. For example, how was the lady who came in supposed to know the wifi password, the proxy settings or that youtube was blocked?
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
    The lady did not know where the WiFi icon is or where the proxy settings widget is. The latter is understandable the first just shows utter and complete uselessness.
  - vacri 9y ago
    You've misread the article. He isn't complaining about her not knowing the proxy setting. He's far from being arrogant - he's complaining about how people look down their nose at 'support' while being clueless about the things they need support with. He's not complaining that she doesn't know that the proxy blocks streaming video, he's complaining that she doesn't know that her powerpoint presentation uses streaming video and what the ramifications of that are. Read the article again and this time actually look at what he's complaining about, not just the tech keywords in the story. His problem is with her demeanor, not her skill.
- ef4 9y ago
  The observations in that post are helpful to illustrate the problem. But I can't agree with the author's conclusions. There's another way to read every single one of his examples: as evidence of a design failure. For example: > A message box opens up, but the kid clicks OK so quickly that I don't have time to read the message. Users are so bombarded by unhelpful dialog boxes that many are trained to dismiss them as fast as possible. It becomes subconscious, some users literally can't see the dialogs anymore. > I hand back the laptop and tell him that it's infected. He asks what he needs to do, and I suggest he reinstalls Windows. This is obviously not the users fault. It's the responsibility of the system designers to make it hard to subvert. iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done (through means that the author doesn't approve of, like application signing). > I take the offending laptop from out of her hands, toggle the wireless switch that resides on the side, and hand it back to her. Poor design decision. Normal users in 2017 basically never want no-network, dedicating the cost of a physical switch to it is doubly bad. My point is that the author needs to stop lamenting that the hoi polloi have breached the gates and start taking seriously the question of how to design general purpose computing that actually serves most human beings. "Use Linux" is not, by itself, a remotely helpful suggestion. His "Mobile" suggestion is indistinguishable from satire.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Note that the blog was written in 2013.
  - vacri 9y ago
    > iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done If even a company with $200B in ready cash on hand, humongous design and manufacturing resources, and full control at every part of the vertical stack can't make a general purpose operating system with these values, what hope do the rest of us have? iOS is extremely limited in what it allows you to do. If it isn't, then how come macbooks still sell? I've been a tutor at the tertiary level before. Some people just can't be fucked putting in any effort to get what they want. Fuck them; they get to be called incompetent - don't shift the blame. If someone could barely drive a car and smashed it into every tenth lamppost, you'd call them an incompetent driver. Or another example: I can't cook for shit. I can follow a recipe, but it's not going to be very well done. But you would never make the argument that it's the recipe-writer's fault that I couldn't make a good souffle. It's reasonable to expect users to meet developers at least partway here; reasonable to expect some learning curve for an incredibly complex, capable device.
- usrusr 9y ago
  What the post seems to be getting to is a separation into three age bands, characterized by "computers as a mystery" (born roughly before 1970, with a very wide variance to account for different levels of exposure pre-1995) , "computers as tools" (born before 1990?) and "computers as media" (younger than that). Even people not technically inclined at all had to jump through so many hoops when they wanted to play a game, write a report or check their email once a week that they appeared near-magical to their parents. Some people seem to expect "digital natives" (the "computers as media" generation) to continue that, but we kind of knew this would not happen when the playstation pushed desktop gaming into a niche, right? I don't think that there is anything wrong with the term "digital native", except for some misled expectations some people associate with it.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Just to throw this out there, I was born in 57 and there are really good odds that you have been impacted by my code in one form or another. Trivially related, I'd like to preemtively apologize for some of that code. I am not actually a programmer, I'm a mathematician. I programmed out of need, until I was able to hire qualified professionals. Sadly, I did not stop there. I am a pretty horrible programmer.
    - usrusr 9y ago
      The “1970“ is certainly not a strict threshold, but I do think that it can legitimately be seen as a bit of a watershed regarding out-of-field computer skills. (sorry, I can't consider a mathematician who wrote impactful software truly out-of-field, no matter how blessed with humility) Take for example brick and mortar architecture students. Most of those born mid 1970ies would at one point have put a lot of research in speccing out their personal CAD machine, learn how to apply cracks for the piracy countermeasures of the day and design multiple generations of less and less inadequate personal backup strategies. Their peers ten years older? None of that DIY, most would probably have jumped straight from paper to a professionally supported workstations. Their peers twenty years younger? Walled garden app stores.
      - 9y ago
sexydefinesher 9y ago
Excellent, the nerd aristocracy's grip on IT stands unchallenged.
- delinka 9y ago
  And how would it ever be challenged? The moment some non-nerd, non-aristocrat becomes conversant with the machine, gains power over it, molds it to her whims, she has become the nerd aristocracy. The nerd aristocracy's grip will forever remain unchallenged.
  - chongli 9y ago
    The nerd aristocracy's grip will forever remain unchallenged. Yeah. This story reminded me of the Star Trek: TNG episode Schisms. There is a scene when Riker, Troi, and LaForge are on the holodeck trying to recreate the aliens' surgical table from memory. The way the characters interact with the computer to accomplish an extremely complex task -- build a model of a table from fragmented dreams -- is remarkable. The scene showcases how natural and comfortable they are at talking to the computer. Though the episode has its detractors, I'm glad they made it. I can imagine the characters regularly using the holodeck to model and design all sorts of objects in the course of their normal duties. It demonstrates that the power of their tools goes way beyond silly period-piece virtual reality games. The twenty-forth century nerd aristocracy no longer needs to use plastic keyboards and text editors from the 1970s. That doesn't stop them from being sophisticated users of their technology. Programmers, even.
j9461701 9y ago
> And paper co-author Paul Kirschner, an education researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands in Heerlen, happily describes himself in his academic work as a “windmill-fighter”. But whereas Don Quixote aimed against solid walls, the digital-native assumption, on closer inspection, does seem illusory. It is certainly no giant. To fight windmills, as per the English idiom 'to tilt at windmills', means to attack non-existent enemies out of a delusional sense of righteousness (from the last bit is derived the word quixotic). In the stories Alonso Quijano read so many romantic novels about knights and chivalry he went insane, renamed himself Don Quixote, and set off to vanquish windmills he imagined were giants and swear fealty to an innkeeper he imagined as a lord (for the honor of his lady love who doesn't actually exist). This paper's authors being the Don Quixote figure doesn't make sense, as I doubt they were trying to insult themselves. A more apt analogy would be the companies trying to grapple with a new generation of digital natives are windmill fighters (fighting an enemy that doesn't exist), while the paper's authors are Sancho Panza desperately trying to get them to see reason.
- hyperdimension 9y ago
  I learned and always thought that the phrase "tilting at windmills" meant, aside from what you wrote about "to attack...out of a delusional sense of righteousness," more like a futile task or something that wouldn't succeed regardless of your efforts. Because of that, I interpreted the previous comment not as someone who is creating enemies out of nowhere against oneself, but rather someone who is doing something (telling others that "The Digital Native is a Myth") that is a more-or-less hopeless, or mostly impossible task. They're close, but to me there's a distinction between the two.
  - j9461701 9y ago
    Don Quixote is a pathetic, vainglorious egotist with mental problems, whose attack on windmills is just one of his many feats of remarkably willful stupidity. He isn't fighting a good battle that is unlikely to be won, he's inventing battles out of nothing so he can feel special and important when really all he's doing is being irritating and getting beaten up by inanimate objects (the windmill sail). He's to be laughed at or pitied, not respected or admired. That was something of the point, take a classic knight in shining armor from romance stories, put him in real life, and watch how much of a loser he'd be. This might be a case of pop culture failing to capture the essence of a reference, and the misunderstanding gaining higher prevalence than the true meaning. Calling someone 'nimrod' is another example. Nimrod was, unironically, one of the greatest hunters in the bible - smart, swift, strong. But Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd that, and Fudd was an idiot. So anyone not familiar with the Bible character thought nimrod == idiot, rather than Bugs calling Fudd that sarcastically.
kator 9y ago
The article makes sense, that said I have two grandchildren that are five and three. They interact with ipads and phones like they're "normal" life. They talk to their Alexa's and Siri like they're people. They ask the TV to change channels and ask Mom why when they swipe the TV screen nothing happens. My oldest grandson had the funniest argument with Siri, she kept saying I don't understand you and he would say "why you're talking to me just like I'm talking to you." I agree we are still humans and no shocking net-new amazing multi-tasking or concentration skills will come out of the "digital generation". That said these kids are growing up on the shoulders of giants and will expect things to just work. If anything, that could make things harder because they may not want to learn how to make new things work. All this said my grandmother lived through horse and buggy, radio, TV, Color TV, Computers and men on the moon. She used to say the more things change the more they stay the same. Because people are basically the same no matter when they were born.
- wslh 9y ago
  > My oldest grandson had the funniest argument with Siri, she kept saying I don't understand you and he would say "why you're talking to me just like I'm talking to you." Jaron Lanier challenges the Turing test original intend asking if we as humans are lowering our human capacity so machines pass the test. [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434322-but-the-turing-test-cuts-both-ways-you-can-t-tell https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434322-but-the-turing-test-...
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    The Turing test is a thought experiment, not an actual benchmark for a strong AGI.
  - Retra 9y ago
    Nobody has actually performed a real Turing test. A Turing test doesn't have problem domain and time limitations.
    - rocqua 9y ago
      There is some interesting interaction between the Turing test and Poe's law. Put simply, it's hard to distinguish a malfunctioning AI from a troll and / or an idiot.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
When most people talk about digital natives, they aren't talking about learning styles. The idea that you can dismiss the idea of digital natives just because people still learn differently is a little wacky. Digital natives imply familiarity and comfort with the digital technology they grew up with, not anything else.
- nkuttler 9y ago
  So, just like every generation before them that was comfortable with the world they were born into. Got it.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Yes, exactly. It doesn't say anything more profound than that.
- ape4 9y ago
  Yes, I told my parents they didn't need to write checks to pay the bills. They said they were used to doing that way. No Millennial would say that.
- sullyj3 9y ago
  I'm not really sure what viewpoint you're attributing to the article, but according to my reading, the article dismisses the "multiple learning styles" thing as dogma without evidence.
Kenji 9y ago
My sister is a teacher and confirms: While kids play around with their smartphones all the time, they are remarkably ignorant about the basics of computing. They are users, watching videos and composing texts, but when it comes to drivers (okay, who in today's world installs drivers themselves), OS installations, BIOS, but also simpler things like proper backups or Excel formulas, they are completely clueless. > People born after that date are the digital natives; those born before are digital immigrants, doomed to be forever strangers in a computer-based strange land. That's a ridiculous notion anyway. If you put in time and effort, you can learn pretty much anything, and computers and programming are no different, no matter the age. And if you do not put in time and effort, you always remain ignorant. It really is that simple.
- kazen44 9y ago
  >That's a ridiculous notion anyway. If you put in time and effort, you can learn pretty much anything, and computers and programming are no different, no matter the age. And if you do not put in time and effort, you always remain ignorant. It really is that simple. I tend to agree, But younger people have the 'advantage' of being submerged with computers from a very young age. Children tend to pick up things quicker and easier compared to adults. (this is especially true with language, learning a second language as a child is far easier then doing the same as an adult). Also, i think its unfair to judge people on their knowledge about computing when they are not in the computing field. most people don't know how to gearbox in their car works, yet they are still able to use a car just fine.
  - Kenji 9y ago
    > Also, i think its unfair to judge people on their knowledge about computing when they are not in the computing field. Yes but you wouldn't call people who don't know how the gearbox works "mechanical native" or something like that just because they grew up with cars. You acknowledge that there are people like mechanics who know that stuff because they learned it, and other people who do not because they did not learn it. It has nothing to do with generations and so on.
627467 9y ago
I've seen my niece (we she was just under 4yo, she's now 5) open her dad's YouTube app on Android phone and hit the voice button and shout "Pepa pig" to find what she wants. We were shocked to see it. She's Spanish native. And she was not as fluent at her own native tongue as some other kinds her age. Her parents don't know how to use voice. No one around her does. I only use it for setting alarms and never _in front of anyone_ (I'm self conscious about it).
- sidlls 9y ago
  On the other hand I've got kids near that age, was born before 1980, and I cheerily use voice commands and many other technology artifacts of the day just the same as I'd do any other thing in a given social context, and much better than my kids (thanks to the benefit of having lived a number of years and the experience gained from that). I'm not sure why anyone is shocked to see someone using modern technology that's made available to them. How do you figure humans learn? We build on what was learnt before, which requires a degree of familiarity.
  - 627467 9y ago
    I agree with your questions. In this particular case I doubt she has seen anyone use that particular technology. But I guess she has seen her family use whatsapp audio message all the time and established the analogy herself when she saw the "mic" icon on youtube. It is also a testament of the ease of use of some of this tools.
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - DrScump 9y ago
    At what age can one really understand the downside of their body of queries, sites visited, videos viewed, facial images (often geocoded) etc. being stored, analyzed, and profiled with the goal of productizing them? It's a bell that can't be unrung, and it's at least as invasive and pervasive as what Orwell envisioned... but most participate voluntarily.
jccalhoun 9y ago
I teach at a college and I see how terrible these "digital natives" are at technology first hand. Of course not all of them but enough of them to make me laugh when I hear someone say young people are a lot better at tech than old people. What is happening is that there are now different sets of skills: touchscreen skills and keyboard skills. It isn't even that they are particularly good at using phones (students say they don't see email announcements because they don't check email. I ask them why they don't set up their phone with the university email. They say they don't know how) but that they use phones more and have less experience with laptops and desktop computers (while setting up for presentations I see them struggle to log into email or google slides. They type google and enter to go to google.com, then search for youtube, then at youtube they search for the video they want to show. Strangely, when they cut and past a url they almost always right click and select paste then hit return and nearly never use "paste and go" which is right below that in the context menu. They don't know ctrl+f.) So if "digital natives" means anything, it doesn't mean that they are automatically good at tech.
- freehunter 9y ago
  As someone who has worked helpdesk before, all of those things are widely prevalent in every generation. Old people, middle aged people, and young people alike all google "Google" and then google "Youtube" to get to a video. Everyone sucks at logging in. Everyone finds a way that works for them and doesn't know any alternatives. The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world. Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password. And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line! There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here. Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.
microcolonel 9y ago
Today's computers seem to try very hard to draw a distinction between consuming content and being productive. These tasks tend not to share any skill sets at all. My much younger sister was a wizard at binge-watching YouTube videos on iOS at ~6. She used most of the features at her disposal: subscriptions, autoplay, voice search... but despite all of that practice, she never really got to using the keyboard, and is functionally incapable of typing a URL in a timely fashion, or structuring a text search for something full of homophones. She basically just gives up if it wouldn't work through voice search. I got into computers as an interest because on Windows 95, 98, 2000 for WorkGroups, and other contemporary Windows versions (we were not affluent), code of some sort was just a step or two away from using the machine at all. Most computers today (iPhones, WinRT, etc.) don't even have shell scripts on the desktop or a javascript console in the browser. Operating systems in the late '90s and early oughts gave an impression that there were consistent underlying concepts like files and processes or at least tasks. You used to be able to market your dual-core processor as being able to run more tasks simultaneously without trouble, nowadays you just tell the consumer it's "faster", and they don't understand why the same app runs slower on their new phone than the last.
- freehunter 9y ago
  To be fair about the keyboard thing, when I was born computers were programmed through punch cards, and I never learned how to use them. They switched to keyboards pretty quick after that. So to a 6 year old who can't use a keyboard... well I don't see keyboards disappearing quite that quick, but it's obvious that voice interaction is going to feature quite heavily into the future of computing.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Right, but voice input will likely always suck as much for computers as it does for human beings. The keyboard, even the touch keyboard, is a better way to input any reasonably complex string. If people spend any time together that isn't recorded by Google, then they will have inside jokes, puns, portmanteaux (this word was not in my dictionary), and words that Google/M$/Apple simply haven't heard enough of to recognize. In an office environment, it is absolutely unacceptable for everyone to be using voice input to compose documents, comments, and emails.
wallflower 9y ago
When my niece was very young, she would try to swipe framed pictures on the wall. It's not about digital native but having expectations of interactive objects.
kensoh 9y ago
I'm born 1981, so according to the article I've just made it to be a native? What I do observe is this (this is over-generalization but seems true to me) - Pre-internet era - people know little but do a lot and deeply Post-internet era - people know a lot but do little and shallow
- dmmc 9y ago
  I was born in 1980 and, having grown up with computers from an early age, I totally agree with pervasive internet access being the next dividing line. Computers allowed us to do many things we couldn't do before, but the internet took communication and information sharing to another level.
pzh 9y ago
Digital natives? Are people still using this term? So the people who invented the Internet and most of modern technology are called "digital immigrants"? How can one take lazy journalists who still use these terms seriously?
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > So the people who invented the Internet and most of modern technology are called "digital immigrants"? This was a (brilliant) minority of this generation.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  > So the people who invented the Internet and most of modern technology are called "digital immigrants"? Consider if a community designed a new language. By definition, no one in the community would be a native speaker. Couples start having children and teaching the children that language. Those children will be the first native speakers. The best of the non-natives would still have more technical knowledge of how the language works than the average native speaker. That's the situation that we're looking at here.
- flukus 9y ago
  Think of the earliest colonists everywhere, they created their colonies but they weren't native to it. Their children were native to the colony though.
donkeyd 9y ago
I think the term 'digital native' is too disambiguous. There's two things that could be considered being a digital native; one is technical, the other is more functional. On the technical side, I completely agree with this article. Most people my age (late 20's) and especially younger ones, don't have a clue about the insides of their devices, or how the internet actually works. They also don't seem to be interested in a lot of this stuff. They also tend to think that everything that has to do with their devices is complex. On the 'functional' (for lack of a better word) side however, they seem to know exactly what to do on the internet. They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible. They live on the internet, live stream everything they do and make lots of selfies. This seems to be the reason why we're starting to see lots of younger kids becoming YouTube famous, or starting viral marketing companies. The last thing, to me, is the part where people really become 'digital natives' in stead of 'technical natives'. Also, because most devices are so hard to open, most kids won't even get to see the technical side anymore, unless they want to build a gaming PC.
- robteix 9y ago
  > They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible. Is it specific to an age group, though? My mother is in her 60s and she seems to have no problem getting 100+ likes on FB every time she posts a pic of her grandkids. She knows what _her_ peers want to see.
  - spondyl 9y ago
    Her peers could be the type to use the like button as a form of basically saying "Yes, I have seen this"?
- gaius 9y ago
  They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible That's a great skill to have, you know, now that you can buy groceries and pay rent in likes and retweets.
gaius 9y ago
The BBC like to describe older people as "digital immigrants" to contrast with "digital natives" but seem to not quite comprehend that the "digital immigrants" actually built all this stuff whereas "natives" merely use it.
- copperx 9y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with the terms. It's just like in the real world.
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    Consider the difference between "indigenous natives" versus "second-generation immigrants." Technical professionals are arguably the indigenous natives, present "before it was cool" and working to coerce a inimical environment into something suitable and appealing to people.
    - resf 9y ago
      Consider Dubai. Built by immigrants, used by natives.
      - Terr_ 9y ago
        Considered in many ways an exception and unusual occurrence.
- im3w1l 9y ago
  I prefer digital settlers. It invokes going into the virgin lands of cyberspace, and building something there.
duckingtest 9y ago
It turned out to be a misconception because computers are astronomically easier to use now. If you had to ever configure a config.sys entry for a specific game you know what I mean.
doozy 9y ago
The digital native is not a myth, he's just going extinct. Back in the day the difference between a computer user and a computer programmer was, at best, blurry. You had to know how to program to use a computer. And hardware and operating systems were complicated things you had to study, they weren't the appliances of today that "just work". I think the breaking point was around the time Windows XP and Mac OS X were released. The difference in skills between those raised before that time and nowadays is mind blowing. So the digital native exists, you just won't find one without grey hair.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  That's definitely one way of looking at it, so now what we really have are digital colonists.
- KGIII 9y ago
  This reminds me of a story I like to share. You can have the short version. I touched my first computer in the early seventies. It was from HP, took punch cards, mag strip cards, keyed entry, and could output to a plotter, tv, or LED. It was horrible. I hated it. Late seventies, early eighties, I now have to use a terminally connected computer and have a computer at home that required additional memory, just to use lowercase letters. It was horrible. I hated it. Late eighties, it hasn't improved. No, no it has not. I still have to dance a strange dance and wait for my work to be completed. Usually, that meant waiting for my work to be completed in another part of the university. If I wanted to search the 'net, those searches went out to people - who'd send me an answer back in as long as 72 hours. It was horrible. I hated it. I pretty much hated computers until the 2000s. Oh, I used the Infernal Beasts of Spite and Retribution - but it was adversarial. We're on friendly terms, more like old enemies too tired to continue fighting but with mutual respect. I don't like programming, tweaking, or fixing. I will, but I don't like it. In fact, I use Linux because she's a familiar beast and I pretty much don't ever have to screw with it. It does what I want and stays the hell out of my way. That's the short version. It usually contains more details and a whole lot more vulgarities. As a parting comment, it has been wonderful to live through these changes and advancements.
perakojotgenije 9y ago
No news here. This excellent blog post is from 2013: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you[1] [1]http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Thanks, that post was the first thing I thought of, but couldn't remember the details.
joaorico 9y ago
There's a slight confusion in this thread, that many are rightfully pointing out, as there's a bit of context missing in the article. The thing is, the term 'digital native' has been heavily used as a way of saying that children that grew up surrounded by tablets and TVs and the internet actually learn differently from the so-called digital immigrants. For an example, see these quotes by Marc Prensky cited in the literature thousands of times: ‘today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors’ [1] ‘Our students, as digital natives, will continue to evolve and change so rapidly that we won’t be able to keep up’ [2] ‘Our young people generally have a much better idea of what the future is bringing than we do’ [2] ‘In fact they are so different from us that we can no longer use either our twentieth century knowledge or training as a guide to what is best for them educationally’ [2] Now this might immediately sound extremely suspicious for anyone who has some background on the research of how humans learn, but it's a common myth all over the learning world. 'Oh I can't learn from books, I need interactive videos and apps, that's why I have bad grades.' Actually computers are an excellent choice for learning if applied correctly, but this is not what is usually being implied in these situations. There's a big confusion between how much children are familiar with using technology from a consumer's point of view, and the natural human ability to learn. The latter hasn't changed. The debunking of 'digital natives' is not new either [3]. By the way, for anyone interested, I recommend Hattie and Yates' book on learning [4] as a great, very balanced, modern introduction. [1] (cited 18000 times!) Prensky, Marc. "Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1." On the horizon 9.5 (2001): 1-6. [2] (cited 1000 times) Prensky, Marc. "Listen to the natives." Educational leadership 63.4 (2005). [3] (cited 2700 times) Bennett, Sue, Karl Maton, and Lisa Kervin. "The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence." British journal of educational technology 39.5 (2008): 775-786. [4] Hattie, John, and Gregory CR Yates. Visible learning and the science of how we learn. Routledge, 2013.
bitwize 9y ago
"Digital natives" is a codephrase used by employers to mean "we only want to hire young people; if you're over 30 you won't be considered". It's dogwhistle discrimination.
jrnichols 9y ago
Working in tech support anywhere would have shown you this. The supposed digital natives aren't born web savvy.. they're the ones that just expect everything to work flawlessly, and "just make it work." They don't understand the how and why something works, and they don't care. and get off my lawn. :)
mahyarm 9y ago
I think it's somewhat like cars. One generation never used cars, another grew up along side cars where changing your own oil was a standard thing people do and now cars are better, people don't know much about cars any more.
nitwit005 9y ago
I suspect it'd be more accurate to say that many of them know quite a bit, it's just that there's no overlap with what schools want them to know. I'm sure a younger version of myself would have completely failed a basic test of computer literacy. And yet, I set up DOS extended memory, configured hardware settings for the Sound Blaster, and calibrated a joystick, so I could play Tie Fighter. The only skill I think a school might have valued was that I learned a tiny bit of basic to fiddle with that qbasic game where the gorillas threw bananas at each other.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mtl_usr 9y ago
I stopped believing in the "digital native" buzzword after spending some time with some older relatives. Because nobody makes good old fashioned cellphones that can only make calls they were all upgraded to touch-screen smartphones. A lot of them came to me for direction to perform the most basic tasks. They were interested in downloading apps, getting the news from their devices, managing pictures and generally browsing the internet from them. At first I explained every step of the process and I noticed they would all mechanically memorize the steps without really understanding any of them. So I changed my approach. I told them that, software wise, whatever happens to their device I can repair it and that instead of waiting for me to have a minute to go over the steps with them, they should try themselves and if something bad happens then they should come to me. This has changed their behavior dramatically. They are now more confident using their devices, knowing that someone can get them out of trouble should problem arises, and try new features by themselves. An example of that is when they enabled voice control and started to play with it. I like to separate users in two categories that I consider more realistic than "Digital Native" and so called "Digital Immigrants". I refer to them as having an "Active" position toward technology and a "Passive" position. The active crowd search for solutions themselves and learn by exploration while the passive crowd pretty much will only do as directed and what they have been taught with clear explanation. I noticed this pattern of refusing to explore new tools and platforms when exposed to one not closely related with age, as many young "Digital Natives" would get extremely confused when exposed to a new tech. Even stuff as basic as an oldschool car GPS (not their usual phone) would confuse them.

189 points by okket 9y ago

Compare to an excellent report from the trenches: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co.... A very good read.

raverbashing 9y ago
I'm glad that things "just work" for the most part and you don't have to think about them But at the same time these are unnerving. It's not about "not knowing how to use computers" it's about NOT READING WHAT'S IN PLAIN SIGHT
- vacri 9y ago
  once when I was working support, I needed a client to read back to me the contents of an error box - it could only be one of two boxes. She said the content was something else ("the files are corrupt"), which wouldn't happen in that part of the workflow (and wouldn't make sense at that point anyway). I got her to read back the error dialogue word-by-word. She still just made it up ("the. files. are. corrupt."). It wasn't until I got her to read out the error message letter by letter that I found out what it actually said and was able to help her...
narrator 9y ago
This was kind of painful to read. The author's tech arrogance is extreme. For example, how was the lady who came in supposed to know the wifi password, the proxy settings or that youtube was blocked?
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
  The lady did not know where the WiFi icon is or where the proxy settings widget is. The latter is understandable the first just shows utter and complete uselessness.
- vacri 9y ago
  You've misread the article. He isn't complaining about her not knowing the proxy setting. He's far from being arrogant - he's complaining about how people look down their nose at 'support' while being clueless about the things they need support with. He's not complaining that she doesn't know that the proxy blocks streaming video, he's complaining that she doesn't know that her powerpoint presentation uses streaming video and what the ramifications of that are. Read the article again and this time actually look at what he's complaining about, not just the tech keywords in the story. His problem is with her demeanor, not her skill.
ef4 9y ago
The observations in that post are helpful to illustrate the problem. But I can't agree with the author's conclusions. There's another way to read every single one of his examples: as evidence of a design failure. For example: > A message box opens up, but the kid clicks OK so quickly that I don't have time to read the message. Users are so bombarded by unhelpful dialog boxes that many are trained to dismiss them as fast as possible. It becomes subconscious, some users literally can't see the dialogs anymore. > I hand back the laptop and tell him that it's infected. He asks what he needs to do, and I suggest he reinstalls Windows. This is obviously not the users fault. It's the responsibility of the system designers to make it hard to subvert. iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done (through means that the author doesn't approve of, like application signing). > I take the offending laptop from out of her hands, toggle the wireless switch that resides on the side, and hand it back to her. Poor design decision. Normal users in 2017 basically never want no-network, dedicating the cost of a physical switch to it is doubly bad. My point is that the author needs to stop lamenting that the hoi polloi have breached the gates and start taking seriously the question of how to design general purpose computing that actually serves most human beings. "Use Linux" is not, by itself, a remotely helpful suggestion. His "Mobile" suggestion is indistinguishable from satire.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Note that the blog was written in 2013.
- vacri 9y ago
  > iOS is now ten years old with no major malware outbreaks -- it can obviously be done If even a company with $200B in ready cash on hand, humongous design and manufacturing resources, and full control at every part of the vertical stack can't make a general purpose operating system with these values, what hope do the rest of us have? iOS is extremely limited in what it allows you to do. If it isn't, then how come macbooks still sell? I've been a tutor at the tertiary level before. Some people just can't be fucked putting in any effort to get what they want. Fuck them; they get to be called incompetent - don't shift the blame. If someone could barely drive a car and smashed it into every tenth lamppost, you'd call them an incompetent driver. Or another example: I can't cook for shit. I can follow a recipe, but it's not going to be very well done. But you would never make the argument that it's the recipe-writer's fault that I couldn't make a good souffle. It's reasonable to expect users to meet developers at least partway here; reasonable to expect some learning curve for an incredibly complex, capable device.
usrusr 9y ago
What the post seems to be getting to is a separation into three age bands, characterized by "computers as a mystery" (born roughly before 1970, with a very wide variance to account for different levels of exposure pre-1995) , "computers as tools" (born before 1990?) and "computers as media" (younger than that). Even people not technically inclined at all had to jump through so many hoops when they wanted to play a game, write a report or check their email once a week that they appeared near-magical to their parents. Some people seem to expect "digital natives" (the "computers as media" generation) to continue that, but we kind of knew this would not happen when the playstation pushed desktop gaming into a niche, right? I don't think that there is anything wrong with the term "digital native", except for some misled expectations some people associate with it.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Just to throw this out there, I was born in 57 and there are really good odds that you have been impacted by my code in one form or another. Trivially related, I'd like to preemtively apologize for some of that code. I am not actually a programmer, I'm a mathematician. I programmed out of need, until I was able to hire qualified professionals. Sadly, I did not stop there. I am a pretty horrible programmer.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    The “1970“ is certainly not a strict threshold, but I do think that it can legitimately be seen as a bit of a watershed regarding out-of-field computer skills. (sorry, I can't consider a mathematician who wrote impactful software truly out-of-field, no matter how blessed with humility) Take for example brick and mortar architecture students. Most of those born mid 1970ies would at one point have put a lot of research in speccing out their personal CAD machine, learn how to apply cracks for the piracy countermeasures of the day and design multiple generations of less and less inadequate personal backup strategies. Their peers ten years older? None of that DIY, most would probably have jumped straight from paper to a professionally supported workstations. Their peers twenty years younger? Walled garden app stores.
    - 9y ago

sexydefinesher 9y ago

Excellent, the nerd aristocracy's grip on IT stands unchallenged.

delinka 9y ago
And how would it ever be challenged? The moment some non-nerd, non-aristocrat becomes conversant with the machine, gains power over it, molds it to her whims, she has become the nerd aristocracy. The nerd aristocracy's grip will forever remain unchallenged.
- chongli 9y ago
  The nerd aristocracy's grip will forever remain unchallenged. Yeah. This story reminded me of the Star Trek: TNG episode Schisms. There is a scene when Riker, Troi, and LaForge are on the holodeck trying to recreate the aliens' surgical table from memory. The way the characters interact with the computer to accomplish an extremely complex task -- build a model of a table from fragmented dreams -- is remarkable. The scene showcases how natural and comfortable they are at talking to the computer. Though the episode has its detractors, I'm glad they made it. I can imagine the characters regularly using the holodeck to model and design all sorts of objects in the course of their normal duties. It demonstrates that the power of their tools goes way beyond silly period-piece virtual reality games. The twenty-forth century nerd aristocracy no longer needs to use plastic keyboards and text editors from the 1970s. That doesn't stop them from being sophisticated users of their technology. Programmers, even.

j9461701 9y ago

> And paper co-author Paul Kirschner, an education researcher at the Open University of the Netherlands in Heerlen, happily describes himself in his academic work as a “windmill-fighter”. But whereas Don Quixote aimed against solid walls, the digital-native assumption, on closer inspection, does seem illusory. It is certainly no giant. To fight windmills, as per the English idiom 'to tilt at windmills', means to attack non-existent enemies out of a delusional sense of righteousness (from the last bit is derived the word quixotic). In the stories Alonso Quijano read so many romantic novels about knights and chivalry he went insane, renamed himself Don Quixote, and set off to vanquish windmills he imagined were giants and swear fealty to an innkeeper he imagined as a lord (for the honor of his lady love who doesn't actually exist). This paper's authors being the Don Quixote figure doesn't make sense, as I doubt they were trying to insult themselves. A more apt analogy would be the companies trying to grapple with a new generation of digital natives are windmill fighters (fighting an enemy that doesn't exist), while the paper's authors are Sancho Panza desperately trying to get them to see reason.

hyperdimension 9y ago
I learned and always thought that the phrase "tilting at windmills" meant, aside from what you wrote about "to attack...out of a delusional sense of righteousness," more like a futile task or something that wouldn't succeed regardless of your efforts. Because of that, I interpreted the previous comment not as someone who is creating enemies out of nowhere against oneself, but rather someone who is doing something (telling others that "The Digital Native is a Myth") that is a more-or-less hopeless, or mostly impossible task. They're close, but to me there's a distinction between the two.
- j9461701 9y ago
  Don Quixote is a pathetic, vainglorious egotist with mental problems, whose attack on windmills is just one of his many feats of remarkably willful stupidity. He isn't fighting a good battle that is unlikely to be won, he's inventing battles out of nothing so he can feel special and important when really all he's doing is being irritating and getting beaten up by inanimate objects (the windmill sail). He's to be laughed at or pitied, not respected or admired. That was something of the point, take a classic knight in shining armor from romance stories, put him in real life, and watch how much of a loser he'd be. This might be a case of pop culture failing to capture the essence of a reference, and the misunderstanding gaining higher prevalence than the true meaning. Calling someone 'nimrod' is another example. Nimrod was, unironically, one of the greatest hunters in the bible - smart, swift, strong. But Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd that, and Fudd was an idiot. So anyone not familiar with the Bible character thought nimrod == idiot, rather than Bugs calling Fudd that sarcastically.

kator 9y ago

The article makes sense, that said I have two grandchildren that are five and three. They interact with ipads and phones like they're "normal" life. They talk to their Alexa's and Siri like they're people. They ask the TV to change channels and ask Mom why when they swipe the TV screen nothing happens. My oldest grandson had the funniest argument with Siri, she kept saying I don't understand you and he would say "why you're talking to me just like I'm talking to you." I agree we are still humans and no shocking net-new amazing multi-tasking or concentration skills will come out of the "digital generation". That said these kids are growing up on the shoulders of giants and will expect things to just work. If anything, that could make things harder because they may not want to learn how to make new things work. All this said my grandmother lived through horse and buggy, radio, TV, Color TV, Computers and men on the moon. She used to say the more things change the more they stay the same. Because people are basically the same no matter when they were born.

wslh 9y ago
> My oldest grandson had the funniest argument with Siri, she kept saying I don't understand you and he would say "why you're talking to me just like I'm talking to you." Jaron Lanier challenges the Turing test original intend asking if we as humans are lowering our human capacity so machines pass the test. [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434322-but-the-turing-test-cuts-both-ways-you-can-t-tell https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/434322-but-the-turing-test-...
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  The Turing test is a thought experiment, not an actual benchmark for a strong AGI.
- Retra 9y ago
  Nobody has actually performed a real Turing test. A Turing test doesn't have problem domain and time limitations.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    There is some interesting interaction between the Turing test and Poe's law. Put simply, it's hard to distinguish a malfunctioning AI from a troll and / or an idiot.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

When most people talk about digital natives, they aren't talking about learning styles. The idea that you can dismiss the idea of digital natives just because people still learn differently is a little wacky. Digital natives imply familiarity and comfort with the digital technology they grew up with, not anything else.

nkuttler 9y ago
So, just like every generation before them that was comfortable with the world they were born into. Got it.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Yes, exactly. It doesn't say anything more profound than that.
ape4 9y ago
Yes, I told my parents they didn't need to write checks to pay the bills. They said they were used to doing that way. No Millennial would say that.
sullyj3 9y ago
I'm not really sure what viewpoint you're attributing to the article, but according to my reading, the article dismisses the "multiple learning styles" thing as dogma without evidence.

Kenji 9y ago

My sister is a teacher and confirms: While kids play around with their smartphones all the time, they are remarkably ignorant about the basics of computing. They are users, watching videos and composing texts, but when it comes to drivers (okay, who in today's world installs drivers themselves), OS installations, BIOS, but also simpler things like proper backups or Excel formulas, they are completely clueless. > People born after that date are the digital natives; those born before are digital immigrants, doomed to be forever strangers in a computer-based strange land. That's a ridiculous notion anyway. If you put in time and effort, you can learn pretty much anything, and computers and programming are no different, no matter the age. And if you do not put in time and effort, you always remain ignorant. It really is that simple.

kazen44 9y ago
>That's a ridiculous notion anyway. If you put in time and effort, you can learn pretty much anything, and computers and programming are no different, no matter the age. And if you do not put in time and effort, you always remain ignorant. It really is that simple. I tend to agree, But younger people have the 'advantage' of being submerged with computers from a very young age. Children tend to pick up things quicker and easier compared to adults. (this is especially true with language, learning a second language as a child is far easier then doing the same as an adult). Also, i think its unfair to judge people on their knowledge about computing when they are not in the computing field. most people don't know how to gearbox in their car works, yet they are still able to use a car just fine.
- Kenji 9y ago
  > Also, i think its unfair to judge people on their knowledge about computing when they are not in the computing field. Yes but you wouldn't call people who don't know how the gearbox works "mechanical native" or something like that just because they grew up with cars. You acknowledge that there are people like mechanics who know that stuff because they learned it, and other people who do not because they did not learn it. It has nothing to do with generations and so on.

627467 9y ago

I've seen my niece (we she was just under 4yo, she's now 5) open her dad's YouTube app on Android phone and hit the voice button and shout "Pepa pig" to find what she wants. We were shocked to see it. She's Spanish native. And she was not as fluent at her own native tongue as some other kinds her age. Her parents don't know how to use voice. No one around her does. I only use it for setting alarms and never _in front of anyone_ (I'm self conscious about it).

sidlls 9y ago
On the other hand I've got kids near that age, was born before 1980, and I cheerily use voice commands and many other technology artifacts of the day just the same as I'd do any other thing in a given social context, and much better than my kids (thanks to the benefit of having lived a number of years and the experience gained from that). I'm not sure why anyone is shocked to see someone using modern technology that's made available to them. How do you figure humans learn? We build on what was learnt before, which requires a degree of familiarity.
- 627467 9y ago
  I agree with your questions. In this particular case I doubt she has seen anyone use that particular technology. But I guess she has seen her family use whatsapp audio message all the time and established the analogy herself when she saw the "mic" icon on youtube. It is also a testament of the ease of use of some of this tools.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- DrScump 9y ago
  At what age can one really understand the downside of their body of queries, sites visited, videos viewed, facial images (often geocoded) etc. being stored, analyzed, and profiled with the goal of productizing them? It's a bell that can't be unrung, and it's at least as invasive and pervasive as what Orwell envisioned... but most participate voluntarily.

jccalhoun 9y ago

I teach at a college and I see how terrible these "digital natives" are at technology first hand. Of course not all of them but enough of them to make me laugh when I hear someone say young people are a lot better at tech than old people. What is happening is that there are now different sets of skills: touchscreen skills and keyboard skills. It isn't even that they are particularly good at using phones (students say they don't see email announcements because they don't check email. I ask them why they don't set up their phone with the university email. They say they don't know how) but that they use phones more and have less experience with laptops and desktop computers (while setting up for presentations I see them struggle to log into email or google slides. They type google and enter to go to google.com, then search for youtube, then at youtube they search for the video they want to show. Strangely, when they cut and past a url they almost always right click and select paste then hit return and nearly never use "paste and go" which is right below that in the context menu. They don't know ctrl+f.) So if "digital natives" means anything, it doesn't mean that they are automatically good at tech.

freehunter 9y ago
As someone who has worked helpdesk before, all of those things are widely prevalent in every generation. Old people, middle aged people, and young people alike all google "Google" and then google "Youtube" to get to a video. Everyone sucks at logging in. Everyone finds a way that works for them and doesn't know any alternatives. The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world. Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password. And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line! There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here. Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.

microcolonel 9y ago

Today's computers seem to try very hard to draw a distinction between consuming content and being productive. These tasks tend not to share any skill sets at all. My much younger sister was a wizard at binge-watching YouTube videos on iOS at ~6. She used most of the features at her disposal: subscriptions, autoplay, voice search... but despite all of that practice, she never really got to using the keyboard, and is functionally incapable of typing a URL in a timely fashion, or structuring a text search for something full of homophones. She basically just gives up if it wouldn't work through voice search. I got into computers as an interest because on Windows 95, 98, 2000 for WorkGroups, and other contemporary Windows versions (we were not affluent), code of some sort was just a step or two away from using the machine at all. Most computers today (iPhones, WinRT, etc.) don't even have shell scripts on the desktop or a javascript console in the browser. Operating systems in the late '90s and early oughts gave an impression that there were consistent underlying concepts like files and processes or at least tasks. You used to be able to market your dual-core processor as being able to run more tasks simultaneously without trouble, nowadays you just tell the consumer it's "faster", and they don't understand why the same app runs slower on their new phone than the last.

freehunter 9y ago
To be fair about the keyboard thing, when I was born computers were programmed through punch cards, and I never learned how to use them. They switched to keyboards pretty quick after that. So to a 6 year old who can't use a keyboard... well I don't see keyboards disappearing quite that quick, but it's obvious that voice interaction is going to feature quite heavily into the future of computing.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Right, but voice input will likely always suck as much for computers as it does for human beings. The keyboard, even the touch keyboard, is a better way to input any reasonably complex string. If people spend any time together that isn't recorded by Google, then they will have inside jokes, puns, portmanteaux (this word was not in my dictionary), and words that Google/M$/Apple simply haven't heard enough of to recognize. In an office environment, it is absolutely unacceptable for everyone to be using voice input to compose documents, comments, and emails.

wallflower 9y ago

When my niece was very young, she would try to swipe framed pictures on the wall. It's not about digital native but having expectations of interactive objects.

kensoh 9y ago

I'm born 1981, so according to the article I've just made it to be a native? What I do observe is this (this is over-generalization but seems true to me) - Pre-internet era - people know little but do a lot and deeply Post-internet era - people know a lot but do little and shallow

dmmc 9y ago
I was born in 1980 and, having grown up with computers from an early age, I totally agree with pervasive internet access being the next dividing line. Computers allowed us to do many things we couldn't do before, but the internet took communication and information sharing to another level.

pzh 9y ago

Digital natives? Are people still using this term? So the people who invented the Internet and most of modern technology are called "digital immigrants"? How can one take lazy journalists who still use these terms seriously?

wolfgke 9y ago
> So the people who invented the Internet and most of modern technology are called "digital immigrants"? This was a (brilliant) minority of this generation.
khedoros1 9y ago
> So the people who invented the Internet and most of modern technology are called "digital immigrants"? Consider if a community designed a new language. By definition, no one in the community would be a native speaker. Couples start having children and teaching the children that language. Those children will be the first native speakers. The best of the non-natives would still have more technical knowledge of how the language works than the average native speaker. That's the situation that we're looking at here.
flukus 9y ago
Think of the earliest colonists everywhere, they created their colonies but they weren't native to it. Their children were native to the colony though.

donkeyd 9y ago

I think the term 'digital native' is too disambiguous. There's two things that could be considered being a digital native; one is technical, the other is more functional. On the technical side, I completely agree with this article. Most people my age (late 20's) and especially younger ones, don't have a clue about the insides of their devices, or how the internet actually works. They also don't seem to be interested in a lot of this stuff. They also tend to think that everything that has to do with their devices is complex. On the 'functional' (for lack of a better word) side however, they seem to know exactly what to do on the internet. They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible. They live on the internet, live stream everything they do and make lots of selfies. This seems to be the reason why we're starting to see lots of younger kids becoming YouTube famous, or starting viral marketing companies. The last thing, to me, is the part where people really become 'digital natives' in stead of 'technical natives'. Also, because most devices are so hard to open, most kids won't even get to see the technical side anymore, unless they want to build a gaming PC.

robteix 9y ago
> They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible. Is it specific to an age group, though? My mother is in her 60s and she seems to have no problem getting 100+ likes on FB every time she posts a pic of her grandkids. She knows what _her_ peers want to see.
- spondyl 9y ago
  Her peers could be the type to use the like button as a form of basically saying "Yes, I have seen this"?
gaius 9y ago
They know how to get attention on the internet, what their peers are interested in and how to get as many likes as possible That's a great skill to have, you know, now that you can buy groceries and pay rent in likes and retweets.

gaius 9y ago

The BBC like to describe older people as "digital immigrants" to contrast with "digital natives" but seem to not quite comprehend that the "digital immigrants" actually built all this stuff whereas "natives" merely use it.

copperx 9y ago
I don't see anything wrong with the terms. It's just like in the real world.
- Terr_ 9y ago
  Consider the difference between "indigenous natives" versus "second-generation immigrants." Technical professionals are arguably the indigenous natives, present "before it was cool" and working to coerce a inimical environment into something suitable and appealing to people.
  - resf 9y ago
    Consider Dubai. Built by immigrants, used by natives.
    - Terr_ 9y ago
      Considered in many ways an exception and unusual occurrence.
im3w1l 9y ago
I prefer digital settlers. It invokes going into the virgin lands of cyberspace, and building something there.

duckingtest 9y ago

It turned out to be a misconception because computers are astronomically easier to use now. If you had to ever configure a config.sys entry for a specific game you know what I mean.

doozy 9y ago

The digital native is not a myth, he's just going extinct. Back in the day the difference between a computer user and a computer programmer was, at best, blurry. You had to know how to program to use a computer. And hardware and operating systems were complicated things you had to study, they weren't the appliances of today that "just work". I think the breaking point was around the time Windows XP and Mac OS X were released. The difference in skills between those raised before that time and nowadays is mind blowing. So the digital native exists, you just won't find one without grey hair.

Terr_ 9y ago
That's definitely one way of looking at it, so now what we really have are digital colonists.
KGIII 9y ago
This reminds me of a story I like to share. You can have the short version. I touched my first computer in the early seventies. It was from HP, took punch cards, mag strip cards, keyed entry, and could output to a plotter, tv, or LED. It was horrible. I hated it. Late seventies, early eighties, I now have to use a terminally connected computer and have a computer at home that required additional memory, just to use lowercase letters. It was horrible. I hated it. Late eighties, it hasn't improved. No, no it has not. I still have to dance a strange dance and wait for my work to be completed. Usually, that meant waiting for my work to be completed in another part of the university. If I wanted to search the 'net, those searches went out to people - who'd send me an answer back in as long as 72 hours. It was horrible. I hated it. I pretty much hated computers until the 2000s. Oh, I used the Infernal Beasts of Spite and Retribution - but it was adversarial. We're on friendly terms, more like old enemies too tired to continue fighting but with mutual respect. I don't like programming, tweaking, or fixing. I will, but I don't like it. In fact, I use Linux because she's a familiar beast and I pretty much don't ever have to screw with it. It does what I want and stays the hell out of my way. That's the short version. It usually contains more details and a whole lot more vulgarities. As a parting comment, it has been wonderful to live through these changes and advancements.

perakojotgenije 9y ago

No news here. This excellent blog post is from 2013: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you[1] [1]http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Thanks, that post was the first thing I thought of, but couldn't remember the details.

joaorico 9y ago

There's a slight confusion in this thread, that many are rightfully pointing out, as there's a bit of context missing in the article. The thing is, the term 'digital native' has been heavily used as a way of saying that children that grew up surrounded by tablets and TVs and the internet actually learn differently from the so-called digital immigrants. For an example, see these quotes by Marc Prensky cited in the literature thousands of times: ‘today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors’ [1] ‘Our students, as digital natives, will continue to evolve and change so rapidly that we won’t be able to keep up’ [2] ‘Our young people generally have a much better idea of what the future is bringing than we do’ [2] ‘In fact they are so different from us that we can no longer use either our twentieth century knowledge or training as a guide to what is best for them educationally’ [2] Now this might immediately sound extremely suspicious for anyone who has some background on the research of how humans learn, but it's a common myth all over the learning world. 'Oh I can't learn from books, I need interactive videos and apps, that's why I have bad grades.' Actually computers are an excellent choice for learning if applied correctly, but this is not what is usually being implied in these situations. There's a big confusion between how much children are familiar with using technology from a consumer's point of view, and the natural human ability to learn. The latter hasn't changed. The debunking of 'digital natives' is not new either [3]. By the way, for anyone interested, I recommend Hattie and Yates' book on learning [4] as a great, very balanced, modern introduction. [1] (cited 18000 times!) Prensky, Marc. "Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1." On the horizon 9.5 (2001): 1-6. [2] (cited 1000 times) Prensky, Marc. "Listen to the natives." Educational leadership 63.4 (2005). [3] (cited 2700 times) Bennett, Sue, Karl Maton, and Lisa Kervin. "The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence." British journal of educational technology 39.5 (2008): 775-786. [4] Hattie, John, and Gregory CR Yates. Visible learning and the science of how we learn. Routledge, 2013.

bitwize 9y ago

"Digital natives" is a codephrase used by employers to mean "we only want to hire young people; if you're over 30 you won't be considered". It's dogwhistle discrimination.

jrnichols 9y ago

Working in tech support anywhere would have shown you this. The supposed digital natives aren't born web savvy.. they're the ones that just expect everything to work flawlessly, and "just make it work." They don't understand the how and why something works, and they don't care. and get off my lawn. :)

mahyarm 9y ago

I think it's somewhat like cars. One generation never used cars, another grew up along side cars where changing your own oil was a standard thing people do and now cars are better, people don't know much about cars any more.

nitwit005 9y ago

I suspect it'd be more accurate to say that many of them know quite a bit, it's just that there's no overlap with what schools want them to know. I'm sure a younger version of myself would have completely failed a basic test of computer literacy. And yet, I set up DOS extended memory, configured hardware settings for the Sound Blaster, and calibrated a joystick, so I could play Tie Fighter. The only skill I think a school might have valued was that I learned a tiny bit of basic to fiddle with that qbasic game where the gorillas threw bananas at each other.

deleted 9y ago

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mtl_usr 9y ago

I stopped believing in the "digital native" buzzword after spending some time with some older relatives. Because nobody makes good old fashioned cellphones that can only make calls they were all upgraded to touch-screen smartphones. A lot of them came to me for direction to perform the most basic tasks. They were interested in downloading apps, getting the news from their devices, managing pictures and generally browsing the internet from them. At first I explained every step of the process and I noticed they would all mechanically memorize the steps without really understanding any of them. So I changed my approach. I told them that, software wise, whatever happens to their device I can repair it and that instead of waiting for me to have a minute to go over the steps with them, they should try themselves and if something bad happens then they should come to me. This has changed their behavior dramatically. They are now more confident using their devices, knowing that someone can get them out of trouble should problem arises, and try new features by themselves. An example of that is when they enabled voice control and started to play with it. I like to separate users in two categories that I consider more realistic than "Digital Native" and so called "Digital Immigrants". I refer to them as having an "Active" position toward technology and a "Passive" position. The active crowd search for solutions themselves and learn by exploration while the passive crowd pretty much will only do as directed and what they have been taught with clear explanation. I noticed this pattern of refusing to explore new tools and platforms when exposed to one not closely related with age, as many young "Digital Natives" would get extremely confused when exposed to a new tech. Even stuff as basic as an oldschool car GPS (not their usual phone) would confuse them.