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Students true digital natives
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There’s been a lot of talk about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants.” I like to think I straddle the divide, as a former software engineer who’s been involved with technology since the dawn of time. I took part in a usability study on the Apple Lisa — the ill-fated forerunner to the Mac — so I’ve been using technology for a long time. I may not be a digital native, but I like to think I speak the lingo pretty fluently. But then I watch my son — an 18 year old, in the final year of the IB Diploma Program at BISS Puxi, and I see that being a digital native is about instinctive use, not learned behavior. He doesn’t use anything that doesn’t speak in 1s and 0s. He takes notes in class on his laptop, using Microsoft One Note, and writes essays in Word. Physics data analysis brings up Excel. Surprisingly, he still does math on paper, although he uses a calculator that looks like it could fly the Starship Enterprise without breaking a sweat. He mainly uses his iPad for fun, reading news and surfing the Internet in between bouts of homework, although it is pressed into service when he needs to Skype a friend for help. Sam keeps himself organized with Outlook.
What about books, source of all knowledge for the last 700+ years? He still reads those occasionally, bought over the Internet with my credit card and downloaded to Kindle for iPad. It’s time to stop telling young people to “stop fiddling with computers and get on with some real work.” While we had our noses buried in books, the world changed.
(Stuart White is vice principal of BISS Puxi.)
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