The concept of digital natives drives me crazy. The idea, as I understand it, is that those who have grown up with a technology embrace it in a more natural fashion and thus do not use it in ways compromised by early models of the world. So, even if this were true, why would this be universally desirable. This sounds a lot like tabula rasa to me (weird things pop into my head when I write) I remember the notion of individuals as blank slates was always included in the first chapter of Child Development books and as a blank slate children are neither good nor bad. We shape our models of the world as we go and what we are adapting to is a moving target.
We ordered an iPad this morning. The 6 year old and I will start at the same point in exploring this device. Well, not exactly. I have used a variety of digital devices for 30 years and I would suggest I have a much broader range of models to draw on in adapting to new ideas.
So, here is the short version of the beginning of a long story. Sometime in the ’80s Steve and Woz created the Apple II and within a year or so there was a move to encourage schools to use these new devices. To seed the process, Apple was offering small grants for educational projects. I was able to secure 4. Now for you natives, it is a little difficult to explain what happened when you booted an Apple II. You are used to seeing things on the screen. I don’t mean you expect to have program running, I mean you expect to see the interface (if you knew that there was such as thing). There are icons and menus. If I remember correctly, what I saw was a blinking square (the cursor I guess) on what I think was called the command line (I may be confused on the terminology with past linux experiences).
The Apple was waiting. You had to enter commands to tell it what to do. This was necessary, from todays perspective, because there was no mouse. I had no idea what to say to the machine. I had to read to learn the commands. I also had no software. There was little available. I kind of knew what I wanted the machine to do, but I had to learn to program to do so. Actually, Cindy claims the machines sat in our basement for a couple of months until I worked up enough courage to start hacking around.
I taught myself to program. I assume I have some bad habits becuase I just learned to make the computer do what I wanted it to do. This is now considered undisciplined. I probably have a mindset that results in spaghetti code. It would take a while to explain exactly what this is and why it is not ideal. Actually, spaghetti coding is a great example of why natives don’t always get it right. Expertise is difficult to acquire (10,000 hours according to my cognitive psych book) and some guidance or apprenticeship along the way helps. However, as soon as I turned on the machine in my basement, I knew more about the machine than anyone I knew. Living in North Dakota. No Internet. No instructional videos. Just me and that blinking block of grey light on that small square monitor.
…. more when I have time