Freshman Computronics
I got pointed to a rather hairy blot by Matt Asay yesterday on the information instrumentality demographics of a sample population of college freshmen. [Link] I say hairy in the sense of providing many useful paths of consideration and contemplation.
Matt relates some statistics reported by the IT folks at Amherst College. Out of an entering freshman class of 370, they registered 443 computers, iPhones, game consoles, etc. That works out to ~1.2 pieces of electronics gear per freshman. For those of you who suffer from an inability to place that in modeling terms, which is, as I understand it, different from dyscalculia, this means that of every five freshmen, four showed up with one device, one with two, approximately.
The face smacking thing about this is that either there are some -many? – devices unregistered or the freshamn class is much less instrumented than seems the norm these days. For instance, 93 of those 443 are iPhones or iPods, leaving 350 devices, which indicates that some of these freshmen – 20 – showed up without a computer.
Can you do that any more in college? And survive that is? And that is assuming none of the 350 are not computers. From what all the pundits preach about college necessities in this day and age, either they are wrong, or the numbers are wrong, or those 20 some odd are destined for short brutal college careers.
And despite all of the photos I see on the ‘net of college students sitting in lecture hall with a laptop in front of them, I don’t completely credit that one can take notes on a computer. I have read lots of studies and reports on this and they have been unanimous in acclaiming that trying to take notes on a computer is a recipe for poor notes. And as much as I concede there are folks, the young in particular, who key a WHOLE LOT BETTER than SCP, the data indicates it is not good enough. The concentration of keying is not very amenable to note taking mentation.
Of course, given that these young folks may have truly abysmal, lacking even, pen and paper writing skills, and there may be such publication of instructor notes – we have the internet after all and not just Xerox machines – and the intellectual bankruptcy of academic standards that taking notes by computer may actually work better for these students than it would for old flatulences of my cohort.
This only goes for non-technical courses that are all words and can be reduced to ASCII directly. Put this in a technical environment with figures and diagrams and graphs and equations, especially equations!, and that maybe goes into the environment as waste heat. I refer the reader to Paul Ginsparg’s article that I cited yesterday. [Link] Paul does make a good argument for the transcendence of LaTeX and the ultimate clutziness of whatever MegaHard WORD equation editor one uses. And I may be willing to concede that the top drawer exceptional LaTeX user could take down most equations in LaTeX almost as fast as pen and paper, but….. but, not graphics. There is no way I know of that one can reproduce graphics fast enough. Of course, if the graphs are published on the ‘net and one takes the time to integrate with notes, assuming one has the memory, then a distant, improbable maybe.
That is not to say that I am not a fan of LaTeX but outside the scientific and maths nerd population, the density of people who know how to use it shrinks to a perfect zero! Worse, when I was pretending to be CIO of a major Yankee army laboratory, the number of IT guys on my staff, government service and contractors, who had any knowledge of LaTeX was zero. Worser, when I tried to find a LaTeX guru to make me a report style for the lab so the nerds who could do LaTeX could get their reports out in a fourth the time, it took me almost two years. And the Yankee government being how it is, I spent about ten times as much finding that person as paying for the product. And my attempts to get our nerds to pick up enough LaTeX to do reports? Also zero, despite the fact that it would reduce publication costs by about 0.75 and time by a comparable amount.
Enough excorporate equine extorting. The point Matt was making in his blot, and will not sully his excellence by more than citation, is that the entering freshamn class, at least of Amherst but presumably to some extent of the nation, are Mac users. As an advocate (non-justicer) of open source software, there is little wonder that Matt would comment on this and do so objectively. I myself am less concerned abut the matter.
The reason for this is that the success of Apple, which incidentally has suffered greatly in the great politico-economic grrr brrr of this week, has not manifestly increased its footprint in the corporate environment. What improvements it has made have almost exclusively been in microbusiness environments (1-5 people) and individuals/households. The fusion of large corporations and MegaHard have not been manifestly changed by either VISTA failure or Apple success. Indeed, from what I have seen, the inroads in corporate OS committment have been primarily made by the open source community, not by Apple.
Now, it may be possible that people are buying Apple hardware and running Windows, or even Linux, but absent data the idea sags on the cost differential between a good Windows or Linux box and the cleapest Apple available. Further, I will argue that regardless of which organization IT model I embrace, it matters not. If I embrace the fascist desktop, then my organization members will use what I mandate and that will only be Apple in those vanishingly rare instances when it is cost effective. And if I embrace member self-sufficiency, then I do not care what OS and hardware my members use so long as it meets my security and interoperability standards, given which only the fashion fanatic and organizational transient will opt for Apple.
Besides, college is a time for experiment. As I wel know having taken a class in my day in archaeology and actually used digging impelents for credit.
