Some interesting thoughts here re ‘digital natives‘:
In my field, we are accustomed to rehearsing all the usual anxieties about threats to material book culture: we lament the loss of research skills, we worry about deserted archives and lost arts of palaeography. We champion independent booksellers over Kindles, and heatedly debate the merits of open access publishing. In our wider culture, we are nostalgic for elegant penmanship, we issue apocalyptic cautions about diminished attention spans, physical inactivity and eroded social ties.
For my own part, I don’t fear the tide of technological progress, but I am conscious of how hard it is, even when game, to keep up to speed with the latest advances. I am foxed by online grade books and iTunes alike. Even the language can leave us behind. “Virtual reality” rings with a Nineties naffness, as though its claim to reality no longer needed the qualification. We are asked to trust in innocuous “cloud” technology as though the substance of our thoughts and lives could be dissolved into thin air.
Read full story… am not convinced that current students “are a completely different operating system altogether”!
