Further to my previous post (‘The Future’) on my responses to Phil Dick and Wellsian evolution I discovered this write up on ‘Digital Natives’. Aside form the definitions of the ‘digital native’ which are interesting in themselves there was this information about the digital native’s use of the thumb:
“Microsoft [brought up] the notion that kids of tomorrow would evolve differently from those of today, in the physical sense. They quoted the example of a person ringing a doorbell. You or I would walk up to the doorbell and push the button - but we would more than likely use our index finger to push the bell. A Digital Native on the other hand would more than likely use their thumb - because with all the thousands of hours of texting on mobile phones and playing nintendo they’ve been doing it’s logical to assume (according to Microsoft) that over time these kids will evolve larger and more flexible thumbs”.
It is strange to discover that my evolutionary predictions, said in jest, are being theorized in reality. I think the word it 'thumbidextrous'.
On another note, this paper on digital natives and digital immigrants is interesting.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
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Teaching and learning have got to change to accommodate this, but the trouble is that a lot of digital natives, though they speak the language fluently, are almost illiterate in it. My students could jump round hypertext links, chat on MSN, swap videos on their phones and play games like - well, natives. But ask them to find some specific information using google - even something quite simple, and very much related to their own interests, like how many games their favourite football team has won in the last three years - and they were completely at a loss. The use of boolean or even multi-word internet searches, and the ability to skim or scan for specific information, is very low amongst those who haven't been formally taught. Perhaps it's because the natives think they have nothing to learn from the immigrants about the digital world, and the immigrants think they have nothing to teach them. But we should all remember that, bizarrely, in the digital world, a lot of the immigrants were there first.
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