Edutopia - February/March 2008 - (Page 52) world building, scripting, and entirely abstract, logical programming languages such as Java and C++. And so emerges the new scribe tribe of programmers, reaching into (and eventually becoming) the intellectual elite of the twentyfirst century. Programming has already become a tool today’s young people use to communicate with one another via such components as machinima (see the definition below), ringtones, emoticons, searches, photo manipulation, and games. Young people email or IM their creations to one another as we do our Word and Excel attachments, often posting them on the Internet for all to see. I bet few among us have not been the recent recipient of an emailed URL pointing us to an interesting program, a greeting card, a YouTube video, a machinima, or a CHECK OUT Flash: A program that lets users create vector-based animation Machinima: “Machine cinema,” in which simple tools found in video games are put to unexpected ends. Scratch: An easy-to-use programming language developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology game. (And, of course, Word and Excel are programming languages in themselves, with enormously sophisticated programming capabilities built in via macros and scripting.) As the century goes on, those who don’t program—who can’t bend their increasingly sophisticated computers, machines, cars, and homes to their wills and needs—will, I predict, be increasingly left behind. Parents and teachers often disrespect today’s young people for being less than literate in the old reading-andwriting sense. But in turn, these young citizens of the future have no respect for adults who can’t program a DVD player, a mobile phone, a computer, or anything else. Today’s kids already see their parents and teachers as the illiterate ones. No wonder some teachers are scared to bring new technologies into the classroom— the kids just laugh at their illiteracy. So, as the highly literate person of 2008 might start off the day reading the New York Times and firing off a cleverly worded letter to the editor in response to a column, the highly literate person of 2028 may start the day ingesting the news in multiple ways with various types of stories they have programmed to be delivered in a preferred order, each at a preferred speed. And if that person feels a need to express an opinion, a simple bit of programming will allow him or her to determine all the people in the world to whom a response should go, and have it customized for each of them. Or one might program and fire off a video, an animation, or a simulation. As the highly literate adult of today might pen a witty birthday card note for a young niece or nephew, the highly literate adult of tomorrow might program the child a game. And though today’s highly literate person may enjoy a sophisticated novel or nonfiction book on a plane or train ride, tomorrow’s highly literate person may prefer to change, by programming, whatever story or other media he or she is interacting with to suit individual preferences, and might then, with a little more programming, distribute those changes to the world. And, of course, all this extends into the physical world as well thorough robotics and machine programming. Tool Time Tools have always been important to humans; now, intellectual tools are becoming increasingly significant. Until recently, getting an education and becoming a literate person meant learning to use the set of tools considered essential for each field or discipline. The tools in any endeavor change and improve over time, but they generally do so quite slowly, and new tools are often invented not by ordinary people but by “geniuses.” Getting an education in a field has long meant meant gaining mastery of its existing tools. In this century, we will see, I think, something quite different. Using their ever more sophisticated programming skills, ordinary well-educated people will be constantly inventing new tools to solve whatever problems they have. In fact, this will be the expectation of what a literate person does. Already, in many circles (and not only scientific ones, although most are still rather geeky), one often hears someone say, “I wrote a little program to do that.” And whether it’s to find Manhattan addresses or to keep track of how many seconds remain until your next paycheck, a typical reaction is, “Can I get that?” to which the answer is as simple as a URL or a USB key. It takes neither geeks nor armies of people to create useful tools via programming. A woman recently created an extremely useful program to compile and redeem her supermarket coupons. Google was created by two graduate students (Sergey Brin and Larry Page). Just one guy (Pierre Omidyar) developed the original program for eBay. Often, from these initial programming ideas come very big companies and profits. (Brin, Page, and Omidyar are all billionaires.) But even if they don’t yield huge profits, thousands—and soon millions—of people are beginning to create and share good programs we can all use free. Successful companies train new programmers, who then generate their own ideas and tools, in addition to the tools their companies build. Smart businesses are already searching for young people who can create these new tools—employees who are twenty-first-century literate. All of which brings us to an important question: If programming (the ability to control machines) is indeed the key literacy of this century, how do we, as educators, make our students literate? This problem is a particularly thorny one, because most teachers, even many of our best math and science instructors, do not possess the necessary skills, even rudimentary ones. Most of the tools (and even the concept of programming) were developed long after these teachers were born or schooled. Can we do it by bringing working programmers into the schools? Not likely. Most of the good ones are busy programming and have no desire to teach. The answer is not yet clear, but we can either come up with creative solutions to this real problem, or, in their absence, the kids will, as they are doing with so many things, figure out ways to teach themselves. Imagine: Literacy without (official) teachers. Our machines are expected, thirty years from now, to be a billion times more powerful than they are today. Literacy will belong to those who can master not words, or even multimedia, but a variety of powerful, expressive humanmachine interactions. If you are from the old school, you may not enjoy hearing this, but I doubt there is anything anyone can do to stop it. Thirty years from now, will the United States be more competitive with a population that can read English at a tenth-grade level or with a population excellent at making the complex machines of that era do their bidding? The two options may be mutually exclusive, and the right choice may determine our children’s place in the world’s intellectual hierarchy. e Marc Prensky is the author of Digital GameBased Learning and Don’t Bother Me, Mom, I’m Learning. He is also founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning company. 52 EDUTOPIA FEBRUARY/MARCH 2008
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