ario's digital detritus - Born Digital

I attended John Palfrey's Digital Natives talk last night at the EMP and while the material wasn't terribly new to me (yes, kids are all online now and that's changing how they think and socialize), I did appreciate these 3 anecdotes:

-- Wikipedia sabotage

When a kid gets an assignment to research something, it usually goes like this:

1. Google search
2. scan the first 10 results, looking for the Wikipedia entry
3. click the Wikipedia result, skim that for the bits of interest

That's no surprise, but John also mentioned that kids will sometimes make small misleading edits to entries just to mess up their classmates. I find that hilarious (and a good way to keep everyone on their toes... reminds me of the famous story of the professor who declared that he'd make false statements in his class to ensure students were paying attention and thinking for themselves).

-- Korean IM window game

There's apparently a hot game that's taking off amongst boys in Korea (and I can only assume the rest of Asia). Here's how to play:

1. Open your IM client
2. Initiate a chat session with as many girls as possible in your buddy list
3. Whoever can keep up active conversations with each of the girls without any of them becoming suspicious, wins

I like imagining what the screen must look like while this game is being played... a symphony of mad clicking, typing, and window management... probably some bragging to guy friends in other IM windows as well.

-- Going to the library is now a "field trip"

John also mentioned the idea that going to the library, for some students, is approaching the level of being a "field trip." Students look around at all the books and computer kiosks and wonder, "wow, people really did research this way?". It's not that libraries aren't useful anymore, they're more useful than ever... it's more the old style public libraries that get this sort of treatment (I'm thinking super old computers, no internet access). Modern libraries that give just as much attention to the web (e.g. Seattle Public Library) have got the right idea.

I wonder what other things that seem commonplace to my generation will be totally foreign to the always-connected-from-birth crowd. How the hell do you get a kid to read a book from cover-to-cover in such an environment? Looking at my 14 & 15 year old cousins... asking them to climb Mt. Everest would be an easier pill to swallow than reading a non Harry Potter book.



More discussion on this stuff can be found in John's book, Born Digital.