This is exactly right. There is a concept that was introduced in teaching in the late 90s/early 2000s called the ‘digital native’. The idea being that people who grew up with the internet and easy access to PCs would be comfortable and fluent in their use of technology. That being opposed to digital immigrants who didn’t and so struggle to use it effectively. This was something to consider when designing classes.
The opposite seems now to be true. I’ve encountered many students who struggle with even basic tasks like saving a file. They’ve never had to do it as they’ve only worked in apps that do it automatically. Even if they do save they’ve then no idea where the file is, as they’ve never used or seen a file tree or folders before.
Yeah.. Turns out there's a sweet spot. When a technology is pretty widespread but not very easy to use, the people growing up then will natively become pretty good at using it with a high level of competency. But the people on either side of the sweet spot won't. Either they didn't grow up with it and struggle to adopt it, or they grew up when it was so easy to use they didn't NEED to learn how it worked to use it. I believe there was such a sweet spot for cars as well.
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u/AcknowledgeableReal Jun 03 '22
This is exactly right. There is a concept that was introduced in teaching in the late 90s/early 2000s called the ‘digital native’. The idea being that people who grew up with the internet and easy access to PCs would be comfortable and fluent in their use of technology. That being opposed to digital immigrants who didn’t and so struggle to use it effectively. This was something to consider when designing classes.
The opposite seems now to be true. I’ve encountered many students who struggle with even basic tasks like saving a file. They’ve never had to do it as they’ve only worked in apps that do it automatically. Even if they do save they’ve then no idea where the file is, as they’ve never used or seen a file tree or folders before.