As ‘eternal novices’, technology keeps us eager to learn

Have you ever had that feeling where you finally think you’ve mastered an app on your smartphone or a corporate application, only to realize that the interface has changed and you feel lost? You hesitate, then resign yourself to learning to use the program all over again. Like most of us, you hate that feeling, as it reminds you of the inevitability of change, especially when it comes to emerging technologies? Well, get used to it. Because from now on, we will never stop learning. Welcome to the Digital Age.

 As Kevin Kelly wrote in his book ‘The Inevitable’, we are ‘eternal novices’. As hardware and software get upgrades and everything around us changes, we sometimes need a firmware update ourselves as well. This influence has a huge impact on both the way we live and the way we educate our children. To my mind, most education systems still focus too much on the passing on of information, while much of this information may be completely irrelevant by the time our children take on their first job. According to a 2018 report published by Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), 85 % of jobs that will exist in 2030 have not yet been invented. This means schools will need to teach HOW to learn rather than WHAT to learn in their effort to prepare students for these jobs created by emerging tech that we cannot yet define.

 Digital etiquette

To prepare students for the Digital Age, simply throwing knowledge and facts at students will not suffice. It is now far better to teach young people how to navigate the vast sea of information and distill the essentials they need to achieve their goals. And perhaps even more importantly, educational systems need to provide them with basic guidelines on how to use technology without getting addicted to screens. I recently attended the Digi-Social Top meeting hosted by the Dutch princess Laurentien van Oranje where experts from different disciplines expressed their views on the impact of technology as to how we think and behave. It reminded me of ‘The Shallows’ by Nicholas Carr, who argues the internet has made us experts in scanning and skimming, but has caused us to lose our capacity for concentration, contemplation and reflection.

Special attention at the seminar was given to digital etiquette. Children are mimicking our behavior, and we all tend to treat our smartphone as an extension of our hand. It is no wonder that our teenagers have turned into screenagers, and as parents we find it hard to tell them when it’s OK to use the smartphone and when to put it aside. After the seminar, I told my daughters we would no longer look at our smartphones over dinner. They rolled their eyes and sighed ‘mother’s been at a seminar today’. I thought it was a great new habit, but unfortunately it lasted only a couple of days. One of the questions asked at the seminar was whether or not government should regulate smartphone use for children. My initial thought was “of course not. It’s up to parents to keep an eye on their offspring’s digital behavior, set the rules inside the house and keeping their attention to their studies rather than YouTube movies”. Fortunately, technology takes the form of a solution as well. I recently came across the term ‘nudge tech’. The analysts at Gartner say that nudge tech is a way to achieve personalization at scale. Education institutions can use a combination of cloud, mobile, social and data to influence students’ behavior, such as ‘nudging’ them to go to the gym between courses, or establishing good study habits. Technology itself is not the problem. It all depends on how we choose to use it.

 Creating a level playing field

I truly believe that technology has the potential to drive human progress. And while technology may mean that we all have to change our way of learning, it also offers great opportunities to people who are less fortunate than us Westerners. For instance, technology can help the illiterate, by explaining complex matter through visuals and drawings, while text to speech readers are very useful to people who suffer dyslexia or people with a visual impairment. Even more important are platforms like the Massive Online Open Courses that anyone in the world can follow to further their careers. According to research published in Harvard Business Review, people in developing countries and those with lower socioeconomic backgrounds are key beneficiaries of MOOCs. This type of education is available to everyone, provided they have access to an internet connection.

Digital divide

Unfortunately, there is a strange paradox when it comes to internet access: the people who can afford internet usage the most are paying the lowest prices for broadband. This is not only the case when comparing Western nations to developing countries. Even within Europe internet fees differ greatly. If I look at the countries in the regions that I work with, I see that households in Spain and Portugal need to invest twice as much of their household budget for broadband access as people in Sweden or Finland. For this reason alone, it is no wonder that e-commerce is less popular in Southern Europe than in the Nordics.

Governments should not regulate smartphone use by teenagers, but they should definitely make sure that: everyone has decent access to information, is educated enough to understand the information they receive, and is armed to confront the high rate of change that is coming at us. No one can predict what will happen, but we need to create the right circumstances for all populations to cope with the uncertainties the future will bring. To my children, I sometimes have to admit that we do not know everything. Or, to quote Jean Gabin’s song “Maintenant je sais”: At last I know that we never know.