In this article, Kevin Kelly tells the story of his home-schooled child and the curriculum him and his wife tried to create for him. In particular, it documents the parents’ attempt at teaching technological literacy—”the latest in a series of proficiencies children should accumulate in school.”
Talking about his child, he says, “the accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school. But technological smartness can be.” Kelly goes on to list the key insights he tried to impart to his son. The one that caught my attention was this:
“Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it.”
The idea of focusing learning on awareness, skills, and processes instead of learning hard facts about the material (ie. arithmetic, physics, etc.) isn’t new (perhaps, we’ve been revisiting it more often), but applying it to technology is interesting at this point in history. This harkens to the teach-a-man-to-fish adage, except that this is a meta of that meta. Learning to learn. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. These, however learnable or unlearnable, are pretty valuable lessons and I wonder if younger generations are taught them better because of the increased pace of new technologies.
More than one relative has asked me to teach them how to use their iPhone. I’m sure a number of my peers have been in a similar situation. Frankly, it’s really hard to do (aside: it’s a little silly to invest a decent chunk of change into a device whose functions you mostly won’t use and who’s interface you struggle to understand).
Even with well-designed intuitive interfaces, gestures, etc., it’s still much easier for my generation and especially those younger than I to figure out how to operate an iPhone within a few minutes of picking it up. I don’t know if the lowered faculty comes with age or is specific to the zeitgeist or our generation. My guess is it’s both, but the latter more so. A time will come (if it hasn’t started creeping already) when our abilities will deteriorate and if we (or the runts a decade or two behind us) really are more adept at learning, how will that change the types of things that make our kids shake their head at us?
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Tags: beauty, interaction, learning, truth, wonder
