Digital books and digital magazines are not better than their paper predecessors because they’re digital. They’re better because they create a more immersive experience. You are no longer constricted to explaining with words what Beethoven’s 5th symphony sounds like, you can embed a video that visualizes it. You no longer have to jot down a paragraph on paper because you don’t want to ruin the book, you can highlight it and have your highlights automatically summarized on one page. If you don’t understand a word, you can instantly look up the definition without switching contexts, and you can hear the pronunciation of it.
Tablets are a major step in the digital evolution. They change the way we interact with devices: keyboards and mice are all good and have their use, but in many cases tapping and making gestures with your fingers or even moving the device around are more intuitive, faster and more functional.
Young student using iPad (photo courtesy of Brad Flickinger, click photo to go to Brad's Flickr page)
This specific part of the digital evolution was quickly adopted by individual students, and now it’s also reaching entire schools. For example, South Korea is digitizing the whole curriculum and the educational materials. By 2015 all students will use tablets instead of text books. Recently, a Swedish municipality in Stockholm chose to do the same. By 2013, all students from ages 6 and up will have tablets and computers instead of paper text books.
The Swedish Minister for Education, Jan Björklund, had an… interesting reaction to the latter: he criticized the schools in a rather harsh way. I could argue that his criticism is based on lack of knowledge and an anti-progressive stance, and I did. But the interesting thing here is not as much mr. Björklund’s rash judgment as the discussion initiated by it: there were a lot of people who agreed. I got the opportunity to discuss with someone who actually agreed with mr. Björklund, which allowed me to understand the arguments of the skeptics.
Generally, the skeptics arguments are based in the views that “digital is just a distraction” and “digital is harmful”. Some fear an increase in ADHD, others that the easy access to digital poses a hard to resist distraction. The language is another issue: the skeptics are afraid the language will deteriorate as young people start using internet language and abbreviations. Young people will learn the wrong skills: playing games and commenting on Facebook instead of learning handwriting, grammar and math.
License plate using lolspeak. Photo courtesy of Scott Schiller (click photo to go to Scott's Flickr page)
In short: the skeptics see digital as a necessary evil that will turn kids into lazy (and thus probably overweight) geeks with short attention span, poor spelling skills and non existent handwriting and math skills, spending their days speaking LOLspeak, watching Youtube-videos and hanging out on Reddit, never reading a single paper book. I disagree about the first part, but I would love to see a school where the last three are an everyday occurrence. Let me explain:
First of all, digital is in itself neither “good” nor “bad”. It’s a tool, a means to an end and an extension to analogue. It allows us to be more effective both as an individual and as a collective, and doesn’t care whether we use it to create weapons of mass destruction, do Justin Bieber mashups or end world poverty 25 dollars at a time. It’s our use of digital that is “good” or “bad”. My imagination is that most skeptics base their assumptions on their own behavior and the behavior of people around them. Just because they find Facebook distracting, or because their kids start using words and language they don’t understand, or because their peers only send them e-mails with funny cat videos they assume that this is what digital is. When asked, they often understand the benefits in a highly theoretical manner (“it’s good for companies that can become more effective”) but not on an every day individual level, nor on a practical business level. Sure, everyone can say that computers make us more effective, but that’s like saying “cars make us move faster”.
Digital in itself does not make us more or less distracted, it’s not inherently malevolent to our brain. It doesn’t deprive us of downtime. All of that stems from our behavior and our use of digital.
Few people living today would say that “books written by hand are so much better than printed ones” (although I’m pretty sure that this was said when Gutenberg invented the printing press. But people do say that “normal books” (paper books) are better than e-books. I often ask why whenever I meet them, and in the end the answer always is: “Because I like them more”. (There actually is one point where many e-books fall short of paper books: I can’t lend you a book that I bought from Amazon for my Kindle)
That’s what it comes down to: people who think that paper books and hand writing with a pen or pencil on paper are important are mentally stuck in the old paradigm. It’s okay and it works. For them. As long as they are alive the old paradigm will still be around. Nostalgia and habit will keep their skills and ways of working and collaborating in sufficient demand. I mean, there is still a market for vinyl records. People still mostly read analogue magazines. Paper books are still collected and thought of as something that gives a room its soul. But will this girl see the point of paper magazines when she’s a freshman in college in the year 2030?
Language will not deteriorate because of internet. But language will change, that is inevitable. One thing I can promise: language will always be functional. We use language to communicate, and that’s a safeguard: the second we start using language in a way that people don’t understand, we need to adapt. LOLspeak is funny only when you have a knowledge about English spelling and grammar, and LOLcode is impossible to grasp unless you understand basics of programming. Those who want to enjoy either must first learn English or programming.
Tablets are not killing handwriting, drawing or imagination. Using a stylus and an iPad kids can learn to write, spell and draw in a way that I envy them. No longer must they wait for someone to give them feedback before continuing, the software can tell them whether the g was mirrored, or if they misspelled “xenophobe”.
- Handwriting, a skill threatened by tablets if you listen to the skeptics (photo courtesy of Kevin Walsh. Click photo go get to Kevin’s Flickr page)
Youtube is not only cute kittens and Justin Bieber videos. It’s also an excellent educational tool. Those who claim that have never visited Youtube’s education section.
And as for Reddit: it’s the perfect place to learn how to be critical about sources, have a place to geek out about everything from math and science to computer games and ask all your science questions without being made fun of.
There is a problem that occurs when people caught in a paradigm shift want the next generation to have the same skill set as they themselves have. Six years olds today will finish their 12 year elementary schooling in 2025. The world will look radically different then, as we live in exponential times. Nobody can tell you what we will will be doing by then (I don’t even know for sure what my own life looks like in a year from now) but I know that we need to prepare our kids for whatever comes. By teaching them how to use today’s digital tools in a constructive way, we will prepare them for the next generation of tools, and that will prepare them for the next.
What do you think?
