A Digital Generation Gap

An international 2018 study that measured eighth-graders’ “capacities to use information and computer technologies productively” proclaimed that just 2 percent of Gen Z had achieved the highest “digital native” tier of computer literacy. “Our students are in deep trouble,” one educator wrote. But the issue is likely not that modern students are learning fewer digital skills, but rather that they’re learning different ones. 

Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT, for all his knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as his students do, despite having had an account for a year. He’s had students try to explain the app in detail, but “I still can’t figure it out,” he complains. “They use a computer one way, and we use a computer another way,” Guarin-Zapata emphasizes.  

Monica Chin writing for The Verge