The deal announced this morning between Barnes & Noble and Microsoft is one of the more curious tech deals of the past decade. (more…)

At first I thought we should blame ourselves for getting our knickers all in a knot when the rumors started circulating that Steve Jobs’ deadly forces of disruption, honoring his dying wishes, had turned their sights on textbooks. But don’t we frighten easily!

Then I felt angry at Apple. (more…)

How novel to imagine that youngsters aren’t novel.

The title of this entry is an English translation of the name of a German article appearing on August 6 in Spiegel Online. I don’t read Der Spiegel, the largest German newsweekly, in German or in English. Fortunately my friend Bob McArthur does, and brought this to my attention.

The article could be read quickly as merely another superficial piece on young people and the Internet. But this one is decidedly different. Rather than treating youth as a mysterious cult, the digital natives that we explorers can’t quite grok, the article focuses on establishing a simple singular point. “New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend,” states the lede. Instead they are “more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook.”

Could this be possible? You mean they don’t have secret decoder rings? The article is based mainly on some new research out of the Hans Bredow Institute entitled Growing Up With the Social Web. The presentation is available online, but only in German. Spiegel offers a single chart in English.

I do recommend reading the original, but the key point appears best in these two paragraphs:

A small group of writers, consultants and therapists thrives on repeating the same old mantra, namely that our youth is shaped through and through by the online medium in which it grew up. They claim that our schools must, therefore, offer young people completely new avenues — surely traditional education cannot reach this generation any longer, they argue.

There is little evidence to back such theories up, however. Rather than conducting surveys, these would-be visionaries base their arguments on impressive individual cases of young Internet virtuosos. As other, more serious researchers have since discovered, such exceptions say very little about the generation as a whole, and they are now avidly trying to correct the mistakes of the past.

My restatement of the piece would be “Digital non-natives make the same error made by explorers throughout history: both ennobling the savage and at the same time demonizing him.” Turns out the native is human, just like you and me. And s/he doesn’t think that foraging, hunting and “native” dances are remarkable.

Of course consultants like Don Tapscott and Marc Prensky feed us the charismatic guru’s diet of what we want to believe: that digital natives(quite a good term: the secret to success for gurus is coining terms like this and making them sticky) are a superspecies, i.e. able to find technology to be somehow commonplace in a world full of frightening marvels.

They (and we) did not consider that for the natives the marvels are completely taken for granted, thereby losing all mystical powers. What remains are the day-to-day social concerns of all teens, made somewhat simpler to navigate with texting, Facebook, etc. And as always, there is the challenge of learning to use educational tools — whether textbooks or computers & wikis — as effectively as possible. Just because kids grew up with technology doesn’t mean they know how to use it well. And their elders were previously in no position to offer credible advice.

A breakthrough!

I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for this notion to penetrate the U.S. media. I think that the big media that dominate the dialog and the vendors they serve have a vested interest in clinging to Tapscott & Prensky’s anthropological myth-making. People and companies spend big bucks on the extraordinary. Everyday utensils don’t command a price premium.

Does this lede catch your attention (posted April 22nd):

What is is like to go without media? What if you had to give up your cell phone, iPod, television, car radio, magazines, newspapers and computer (i.e. no texting, no Facebook or IM-ing)?

Could you do it?  Is it even possible?

Well, not really, if you are an American college student today.

According to a new ICMPA (International Center for Media & the Public Agenda) study, most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world.

According to the post on the study’s methodology:

A class of 200 students at the University of Maryland, College Park, undertook an assignment that asked them to go media-free for 24 hours.

Students had to go media-free for a full day (or had to try to go media-free), but they were allowed to pick which 24 hours in a nine-day period, from February 24-March 4, 2010.  By coincidence that period saw several major news events, including the earthquake in Chile on February 27, and the close of the Vancouver Olympics on February 28…

(The) study began with this assignment to students:
——————————————————————————–
THE ASSIGNMENT:  This week your assignment is to find a 24-hour period during which you can pledge to give up all use of media: no Internet, no newspapers or magazines, no TV, no cell phones, no iPod, no music or movies, etc. And definitely no Facebook. Although you may need to use the Internet for homework or work, try to pick a time when you can go without using it. This should be an interesting experience for you and examining your own dependencies, so really try to give yourself a chance to do the whole 24 hours.

You will write a post about your experiences. Feel free to do some outside research on the effects of Internet or cell phone dependence and share those links with your fellow students.

If you do NOT make it the full 24 hours, be honest about it. How long did you make it? What happened? What do you think it means about you?

More detail follows on how the study was executed and the results evaluated. After the introduction an entry offers several conclusions, some broad, some specific:

The major conclusion of this study is that the portability of all that media stuff has changed students’ relationship not just to news and information, but to family and friends — it has, in other words, caused them to make different and distinctive social, and arguably moral, decisions.

…they cared about what was going on among their friends and families; they cared about what was going on in their community; they even cared about what was going on in the world at large. But most of all they cared about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet.

…teens and young adults today place an unprecedented priority on cultivating an almost minute-to-minute connection with friends and family.  And the ICMPA study shows that much of that energy is going towards cultivating a digital relationship with people who could be met face-to-face – but oftentimes the digital relationship is the preferred form of contact:  it’s fast and it’s controllable.

…students get their news and information in a disaggregated way, often through friends texting via cell phone, or Facebooking, emailing and IM-ing via their laptops.  Students are aware of different media platforms, but students have only a casual relationship to actual news outlets. In fact students rarely make fine distinctions between information that is “news” and information that is “personal.”

…Students also made it clear that socializing and the flow of information were inextricably intertwined.  When the earthquake in Chile struck, most students didn’t learn about it from newspapers or the evening news. They found out about it first through contacts on social networks sites, and that information propelled them to visit mainstream news sites…Information that is not delivered quickly is deemed as obsolete as the delivery method.

The conclusions wrap up with specific recommendations for universities, developers of media technologies and for journalists.

Perhaps the most intriguing entry explores why most failed to make it through an entire 24-hour span without succumbing to the lure of media.

Fascinating and well-presented, I think the big takeaway is that our often-disparaged youth have not abandoned their connections to the “real” world. Instead they have re-evaluated their priorities and are maximizing all available technology to connect more deeply than any preceding generation.

Courtesy of Bob McArthur I learned that in today’s online the Onion you’ll find the headline “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text.”

Can you blame them?

                                                                                                                               From the Onion

Boston resident Charlyne Thomson said, “Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.” 500 of them in fact!

Detroit local Janet Landsman said, “I’m sure if it’s important enough, they’ll let us know some other way. After all, it can’t be that serious. If there were anything worthwhile buried deep in that block of impenetrable English, it would at least have an accompanying photo of a celebrity or a large humorous title containing a pop culture reference.”  

Added Landsman, “Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t even have a point.”

In humour lies truth.