Worcestershire Journal - On technologies and turkeys
by Karl - December 2, 2008 4:53pm
It was impressive to watch our teen-aged grandsons balance a plateful of a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat while texting with friends who were likely doing the same. It was impressive and, for some of the adults in the room, kinda creepy. The kids weren’t talking on the phones, but they weren’t fully in the room, either. Such is the power of social technologies to make non-participants feel old and out of place.
Between texting, instant messenging, and social sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, kids can disaapear easily, even if they stay in the room. It’s neither all bad nor all good.
A recent article in Slashdot points to a MacArthur Foundation study that concludes, in brief, that online gaming, social networking, and related activities are important not only because they teach valuable skills that young people will need, but that these activities are an essential form of socializing, collaborative problem-solving, and discovery. (Here’s a two-page summary (pdf) of the report; here’s the full report: Digital Youth Research - Final Report.)
The middle-aged and older folks who clawed their way into email are often surprised to find that people who are, say, under 30 rarely use email. Again, they’re preferring to use text messages or SMS-based equivalents such as instant messaging and Twitter.
Not only are American youth embracing these new technologies, but other countries are moving even faster. In Brazil, only about 10% of the people have Internet access, but nearly 40% have mobile phones. As a result. a Brazilian NGO, Rede Jovem, created Mobile YouthNet, a project that reaches young people through SMS on their mobile phones with local opportunities and information about what is going on in their communities.
Facebook, once the exclusive province of college students, is growing in popularity among the parents of the college-aged. For example, in preparation for our Thanksgiving dinners, I checked our grandsons’ Facebook pages (and the pages of their cousins) to jump-start the f2f conversations we’d have while balancing dinner plates on our knees.
Another /. article reminds us of Edsger Dijkstra’s hand-written essay, On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science, written 20 years ago. In the essay, Dijkstra introduces the notion of radical novelty, change that’s so profound that it breaks the metaphors that we usually employ to help us understand change. Because we, as adults, are not able to grasp the amount and rate of change, we throttle the educational system to speed that’s comfortable for us and nearly useless for the students.
The concept of radical novelties is of contemporary significance because, while we are ill-prepared to cope with them, science and technology have now shown themselves expert at inflicting them upon us….The universities will continue to lack the courage to teach hard science. They will continue to misguide the students, and each next stage of infantilization of the curriculum will be hailed as educational progress.
The narrowness of our view of technology results in an educational system that trains students poorly for jobs that won’t probably won’t even exist, leaving our kids on the street corner, ready for a world that has passed them by.
kthxbai
Karl Hakkarainen is a writer who resides in Holden and Phillipston. In addition to holding a variety of technical and management positions in high tech, Karl has been a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, and short-order cook. He has maintained a personal blog, A Traveler From the World of Work, since 2004.