Elliot: Next time someone takes us out for a magnificent chili crab lunch at the Long Beach Restaurant (Singapore), please, don’t wear white.
Cathie: It doesn’t matter what I wear, you always splatter me with the red chili sauce and ruin whatever I am wearing.
Elliot: I think you are exaggerating.
Cathie: Blog readers, do you think I am exaggerating when I say that Elliot splatters his lunch every which way. Look at the attached picture if you have any doubts.
Elliot: Oh, but the chili crab at the Long Beach is so terrific. It’s well worth a shirt.
Cathie: It’s called a blouse and I had to spend as much cleaning my St. John jackets and blouses after having lunch with you as you spent on that new netbook you treated yourself too.
Elliot: I needed that netbook.
Cathie: Needed? You needed a netbook?
Elliot: One man’s need is another man’s ….
Cathie: …. Care to get on with it?
Elliot: Oh yes… well I just wanted to tell our readers about an interesting term that Victor Chen* used at our non-chili-crab, crab lunch.
Cathie: When we explained to Victor that we call cellphones used in K-12 “cellphone computers” to emphasize their computer affordances, he said “Oh yes, thumbtops.”
Elliot: There are desktops and laptops and now we have thumbtops!
Cathie: Since the youth of today can type as fast with their thumbs on thumbtops as adults can type with their fingers on laptops, Victor’s observation is quite insightful.
Elliot: Yes, and remember that the principal …
Cathie: Ron Myers
Elliot: … at Trinity Meadows Intermediate School in Keller TX made a similar comment about how surprised he was at how fast his 5th graders were at typing with their thumbs on the thumb-boards of their cellphone computers.**
Cathie: Adults shouldn’t be surprised; students have had loads of practice typing on thumbtops. In fact, since most of them haven’t had typing lessons, they aren’t particularly effective typing on a laptop’s keyboard!
Elliot: It is hard for an adult to see things through the eyes of the children.
Cathie: Spoken like a parent!
*Victor is the Deputy Head, Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
**See the Pearson Foundation video of 5th graders using cellphone computers/thumbtops now on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwuW9XAONBM
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