@dave I’m still not quite getting a good picture of where you mean to be going with this.

You write: “Many people seem to believe that the kids coming up now are going to be ‘plugged in’ or ‘digital somethings’… in truth, they will probably take these things for granted and not consider themselves any such thing… no more than i considered myself part of any TV generation.”

Well, OK– except that whether members of our generation use the “TV Generation” label or not, the operative truth about them remains the same (which you elaborate on here). In the context of Digital X’s it seems to me exactly the same– whatever the name they will (and won’t) have for themselves, the presumed characteristics of the “postdigital” (and aren’t you just creating a new name for the Digital X’s?) aren’t, thus far, being questioned.

As I see it, and it scares me, postdigital is so far renaming a conception of the future that the digital natives crowd has been yammering about for a long time. Not many of them argue that the separated, application-based understanding of many technologies now won’t transition– at least for that tech that isn’t wholly forgotten– into simply being a part of the context… as represented by the tiresomely common (and tiresomely apt in some ways) analogy of “teaching fish about water.” In fact, that *is* their position. The argument seems to be about when that state will be achieved, if it hasn’t already been.

So, how is being postdigital different from the claims of what it is to be a digital native? And, following that, what does it MEAN to be that way, to the best of our ability to prognosticate such things given our very poor powers of prediction and the near impossible (I’m not going to give wholesale into the post-structuralist view of things hear and say it actually IS impossible, but it’s hard to resist given the nature of the language around the concept of “postdigital” right now) prospect of actually stepping outside of our not-post-digital frame.

@jen I find it hard to understand how you can maintain mastery of method (which is, I note, the most productive pathway to understanding and self-expression) isn’t an important life skill while at the same time expressing empathy with the idea that those very technologies will get subsumed into our every day life and taken for granted. It feels to me like the desire to skip a necessary but not sufficient rung on the ladder. And I guess when it comes to teaching, I see educators as having an obligation to teach not just what is but to help shape what will be, your continual invocation of a strawman about “web 2.0 being the future of education” (seriously, who claims that? Similarly, who claims that it’s not about the people, regardless of what technology is used, from pencil and paper to nanoborg chips?) nothwithstanding.