Digitizing Children — a question for educators

Anjli Narwani
Nov 3 · 6 min read

Im not here to pour statistical analyses or data for argument sake. My job in the article here is to provoke you — urge you to think deeply about how we should be designing learning systems. Not what we are doing. Not what we should have done. I am going to posit what we should be doing.

Graduating from high school in the year 2000 got me a place among the many who collectively are the first batch of the millennium. Calculating my age is not the point here. The point is we were among the segment of learners who learnt computer programming in school, had access to a computer lab and who witnessed ‘google’ becoming a verb first-hand. Many of my peers went on to pursue fields in information technology. And the others who didn’t took to careers in banking, business, mechanical engineering and medicine. What’s interesting is we took different paths to land up in the same pool.

A pool of people specialized in skillsets not immune to the digitalization of our world. A video I watched recently — How Humans Need Not Apply makes a strong point about how people graduating today are entering the workplace with skills almost obsolete for the future of work — skills getting slowly overtaken by automation and artificially intelligent systems. Sure we can argue about capitalism, discrimination, propaganda against education, immigration, and all the other easy to blame elements of the ecosystem. But shifting the blame is not a solution.

From the position of an educational technologist the root cause gleams out at me from amidst all the noise — development of higher order abilities.


Lets see. Walk with me as I retrace where we must have started believing reading and writing are key abilities. Not everyone is the best at them, but having these two as skills are a must have in order to be seen as educated, be employable, and for participating in civil society. Was it with the invention of books? Zoom out — Was is the invention of paper? Zoom further backwards — Was it the need to share knowledge? Atleast from the perspective of the Indian civilization, like I am pretty sure must be true for most civilizations, what led people to invent writing was the necessity for a means to record knowledge. Writing manifested on leaves, stones, caves, whatever medium they had access to. The invention of paper brought about a renaissance. Books and textbooks and likewise the internet are the media — our mechanism to create and disseminate knowledge.

Why did reading become imminently important? Well the obvious answer seems to be in order to have the ability to consume the knowledge. Does just reading alone lead to comprehension of knowledge? Educators, parents and most people would agree, comprehension is not isolated reading — cognition involves thinking. Cognitive psychologists and developmental psychologists have been theorizing human thinking for decades. For now I am more interested in the simple skills of writing and reading. Language teachers know better about the challenges in measuring reading and writing skills, and the efforts needed to train people and nurture expert readers and writers.

So over centuries, in different continents, diverse communities were fostering poets, writers, and orators. Across the globe language expertise evolved as did languages. When English became widespread we started seeing English language learning embedded in curriculum from China to India to Africa to Mexico. Today, in the global race people get rated as native or non native English speakers.

To be great students, irrespective of the language of instruction, (I can safely generalize) we invest 3 to 4 years in developing reading and writing skills during early learning and kindergarten. We invest an additional 4 to 5 years sharpening those skills to reach a minimum skill level — language proficiency, the ability to compete in education and beyond. We can argue our language skills improve as we grow, but I am sure like me you would know if you have learnt multiple languages, language proficiency depletes if not practiced and conversely practicing a language improves proficiency. Yes, it applies even to the first language you learnt — call it you best language if you will.

Until 30 years back we generally accepted paper devices as media to communicate. Newspapers, Magazines, Books, Greeting Cards, Posters and the Mail all found a place in communication and education. By analogy, computers, tablets and mobile phones are just the communication instrument — the means to read, write and interact. I group these into digital communication media.

Back to the point about development. The abilities to read and write did become central to mass education. These abilities were instrumented by paper as the primary media (I say primarily because in many places in the world the blackboard-slate-and-chalk was also primary even into the 1960s). So my question is — When will we realize we need to look at computing in the same manner.

It is not enough for children to learn to type, type fast or type correctly. We need to facilitate development of abilities for effectively using digital media — reading, writing, interacting and creating. Exposing children to typing and reading electronic content at the age when they should be reading books is not enough. Does it mean we should hand tablets out to kindergarten children and they will turn out to be skillful digital natives. Might be more effective to have children build their own games on touchscreen devices. What are the implications on vision, cognition, sensorimotor development, all sorts of other things? Well Plato argued against the invention of paper concerned it would get people to lose the ability to remember if they could simply write down and record things. So do you want to join Plato’s outlook in thinking about digital media, or do you want to consider discussing how we can inculcate digitalized abilities in children. Discussing it might get us a few steps closer to make them less prone to anxiety in the face of artificially-intelligent-low-cost pervasive automated-workers in the future — just like the horses being replaced by cars (watch How Humans Need Not Apply on Youtube for background).

I do not think it is necessary to stick electronic devices in the hands of children from when they are toddlers for 24 7 use. Digital literacy is not everything. What we need to do is discern the abilities needed for (a) consuming digital media and communicating digitally and for (b) developing higher order thinking. If I may be rude to use the horse as a reference again — we cannot be training a person to ride a horse if they need to be an expert at driving a car; nor do we need to get the person to drive a car without making sure they are equipped with skills to do so. We can however, be making them watch others driving in the passenger seat of a car, or we could be giving them instructions on how a car works when you change gears, what strategies you need on the road or the likes of driving instruction. We know from expert car drivers how learning and instruction work. There is more to it besides knowing how to get the car to move. In education, we know from teachers, developmental psychologists and linguistic experts about how reading and writing abilities develop. There are a number of things we need to decipher when it comes to abilities for digital natives beyond literacy.

We were not just sent off to scribble, doodle and accidentally learn how to write with paper and pencil. We have been taught how to write. We have had our handwriting commented on. We have had our writing critiqued. Likewise, in reading we have had our pronunciations corrected. So I think we need a taught method for early learning on skills to use digital media and computing in the better ways. Are there early-learning language — correction — computing teachers? No there aren’t. They are themselves accidental users of social media, digital technology and the internet in general. So where should we begin? Here is the egg and chicken paradox. Should we start by training teachers or children? Some of these children are going to grow up to be teachers too. Many issues present themselves to us from these pressing questions. But before we get there, we have persuasive work to do in first reaching a consensus about abilities and skills the children of ‘so called digital nativism’ need in order to participate in, shape and sustain their digital futures.

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