You've seen all those stories about "kids today" or "teens today" who have known only a world with cell phones, or only a world with Internet acess and blah blah blah. We've finally come to this:
Swipe, swipe, pinch-zoom. Fifth-grader Josephine Nguyen is researching the definition of an adverb on her iPad and her fingers are flying across the screen. Her 20 classmates are hunched over their own tablets doing the same.
Conspicuously absent from this modern scene of high-tech learning: a mouse.
Nguyen, who is 10, said she has used one before â" once â" but the clunky desktop computer/monitor/keyboard/mouse setup was too much for her.
"It was slow," she recalled, "and there were too many pieces."
Gilbert Vasquez, 6, is also baffled by the idea of an external pointing device named after a rodent."I don't know what that is," he said with a shrug.
I think we might be making too much of this. You and I have known only a world with automobiles, but we understand the history of transportation and the forms that came before the car. We've never experienced a world without telephones, but we all know what thr telegraphwas. There is a continuity to technological evolution just as there is with any other area of history that most people try to understant and appreciate. "These kids today" might not fathom the mouse right now, but as they'll get older thy'll grasp that it had its proper place in the history of computing, at least if they get the right education.
Remember that computer scene in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" that gave us a good laugh, the one in which Scotty tries to open a file by talking to the computer, just the way he did in the 23rd century? The need to use a keyboard completely baffled him?
The future is getting here a lot faster these days, isn't it?
