Digital residents vs digital tourists

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My esteemed colleague Doug Clow has just posted a very thoughtful blog post about the glib terminology we use to describe different degrees of familiarity with technology.

I think we should stop talking about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” altogether. It’s unhelpful and unclear. A better distinction might be between “digital residents” and “digital tourists”.

I’ve never liked the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, as introduced/popularised by Prensky, and the “born digital” idea as applied to people (rather than, say, media artefacts) is profoundly problematic. I’m not the first or only person to raise this – lots of people have criticised it. (And with very flaky Internet access at the moment, I can’t link to or cite to them … which is a bit annoying but saves me the bother – good job this isn’t a proper academic paper.)

He cites four reasons for disliking the ‘native/immigrant’ dichotomy:

1. Moral issues in “appropriating language about indigenous people and human migration”.
2. The fact that the categories are not fixed in generational terms: “as is widely attested, there are plenty of retired-age people who have great facility with digital technologies, and spent large amounts of time online, and plenty of teenagers who struggle with them and find them overwhelming and alienating”.
3. The fact that the ‘native/immigrant’ terminology “attributes inherent, unchangability to one’s approach and use of technology. One cannot aspire or attempt to become a digital native: one either is or one isn’t. There are plenty of people who come to digital fluency at a later stage in life than infancy.”
4. It sets up “an insurmountable barrier of incomprehension between teachers (by definition digital immigrants) and learners (by definition digital natives)”.

I’m with him on #2 through #4. #1 seems a bit, well, wet somehow.

Doug suggests that we think in terms of ‘digital residents’ and ‘digital tourists’. I think that’s much more insightful and productive. In fact, having just come back from Provence, a part of the world I love but in which I never participate fully because of my limited linguistic and cultural knowledge, I can see exactly why some people feel uncertain and unsure of themselves in cyberspace. They’re tourists in that space, whereas I’m a resident.

LATER: A comment on Doug’s post points out that the same distinction was made by Dave White on the Oxford Online Education Blog about a year ago.

Lies, damn lies and… er, damn good jobs

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Interesting NYT piece today:

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”
The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.

Hmmm…. Must tell my statistician colleagues. They’ve been rather depressed lately.

On this day…

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… in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly killing an estimated 66,000 people in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

On this day…

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… in 1963, the US, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Moscow banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

Are emails legal and binding? Don’t bet on it.

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This is interesting (from The Register):

A series of emails and phone calls were not sufficient to establish a contract, the Court of Appeal has ruled. The communications did not contain enough information or the formal qualities necessary for a contract to have been made, it said.

Language school the European Language Center (ELC) used to use vacant summer accommodation and teaching space at the University of Plymouth for its courses. The University told ELC in 2005 that it would have less space available in 2006.

ELC later claimed that emails and phone calls in which the University told it that it would have less space available and which contained estimates that it might have 200 beds available constituted a contract to provide that amount of space.

Plymouth County Court ruled that the communications represented a contract, but the Court of Appeal disagreed…

This doesn’t mean that you can’t do contractual business by email, but the four elements needed for a legal contract (at least in England and Wales) must be present. They are, according to their Lordships:

“an unconditional offer, an unconditional acceptance, a consideration and an intention by both parties to create a legally binding relationship.”

Ah, that lovely word: consideration.

Schmidt finally ends conflict of interest. War now starts in earnest.

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From BBC NEWS.

The resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt as a director of Apple’s board has failed to halt a government inquiry into possible antitrust violations.

Mr Schmidt stepped down because the search giant’s business increasingly competes with Apple’s.

The Google CEO recused himself when Apple’s board discussed the iPhone.

In a statement the Federal Trades Commission said “we will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies”.

And the NYT reminds us that Google and Apple still have one other Board member in common — Arthur Levinson, the chairman of Genentech.

So now instead of having Google+Apple vs. Microsoft we will have Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft+Yahoo.

There ought to be a board game in this somewhere.

In the beginning was Word — but now…?

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Thoughtful article by Jeremy Reimer about how the world has changed since Microsoft Word first appeared.  It originated from Bravo, the word-processor designed by Charles Simonyi at Xerox Parc and was first released for the IBM PC in October 1983.  I was a user from the beginning and was entranced by the DOS version, especially by the way it used style sheets.  Word for Windows always seemed to me to be a step backwards from that original, Linux-type idea.  But for years I stuck with it, partly because of the lack of an alternative with equivalent functionality, but mainly because of the network effects: it had become the de-facto standard for office work, and my colleagues built elaborate peer-review systems around Word’s commenting and track-changes facilities.

In the last few years, though, I’ve noticed that I use Word less and less — and only for ‘work’-based activities.  Among the reasons for the change are: I like an uncluttered writing environment; I don’t want to be distracted by the endless temptations of sophisticated formatting options; I like to use outliners when I’m trying to think things through. 

But mainly the reason I’ve gone off Word is that it’s a program designed to help people compose paper documents, and increasingly — like Jeremy Reiner — I write for the web.

So I wind up using web-authoring tools like VoodooPad, blogging tools like WordPress and ScribeFire, sophisticated text-editing tools like TextWrangler and even Apple’s Pages (especially using its nice full-screen view which shows only a white sheet and a live word-count).  Word has been reduced to the tool I use only when a colleague sends me a draft with Track Changes enabled.

Footnote: Quentin and I were talking about this today, but neither of knew the other would blog it. Great minds etc.