Step Change?

Has any other teacher of "digital humanities" noticed a step-change in their students' facility with machines?
We have been glibly referring to digital natives for years, and its true that now students have grown up alongside the digital world. Maybe they haven't, until now, been IN it?
As in past several years the second year undergrads had a class exercise: sketch a simple expert system which directs the user how to get from here to a place in Edinburgh then implement it as a set of web pages. Start with "do you have a car?" and if the answer is no ask "do you prefer bus or train?" and take it from there.
They've been taught to write HTML in Notepad, and for the last 5 years they've each dutifully produced web pages each with a question and a pair of yes and no links to the appropriate pages.
Now. After 10 minutes a few had pencil and paper but one was using Google Docs diagram editor, one another few drawanywhere.com to make their sketches. I asked why. -no pen, they said.
Arts & Social Sciences students. No pen... But no problem, to them. One was using Dreamweaver, which they hadn't been shown. I asked if she knew the program. - no, but it seemed a good place to start learning. Another was linking Google Maps to pages and copying its walking times for the 'how to get to the bus stop' section. A row of students discussed who would go out and photograph the bus stop "with our building in the background"
This is a change. Is it just this cohort? My excellent teaching? An experience of this elsewhere in digital humanities or other fields?

People of the book, leaving quietly

What we study – material on a computer : finding, preserving, absorbing (that is, digitising analogue material: text, images, sounds), re-using and creating (to a minor extent) – we've regarded as something that we do that adds value to traditional subjects (history, literary studies, whatever) and that our department exists because the medium is new, and the traditional scholars and students are not really up to date with the new medium. Whether using it to analyse what exists already, or to analyse that which has been created on the new medium. The implicit assumption is that eventually they'll catch up and we won't be needed anymore. We thought that with undergraduates in level 1 – that as the level of computer literacy rose so the need for the course would fall. We didn't realise they would not suddenly come in understanding what a database was and how it might be used, or even that they wouldn't start to arrive knowing how to search for and evaluate information. The alternative view is that as the creative and the intellectual world moves onto and into the new medium then it is we who will continue and the people of the book who will gradually fade away to become irrelevant.

A L Kennedy

Stranded here while the ash cloud floats invisibly overhead I've been reading an old short story by A L Kennedy. She says
"Go into any place where history is stored and listen. Hold your breath. Hear how still it is. ... It is the huge, invisible, silent roar of all the people who are too small to record. They disappear and leave the past inhabited only by murderers, prodigies and saints."
I think its 'prodigies' that lifts her above the merely good.

Anyway, the digital will change that. We all have our 15minutesoffame and there won't be room for the exceptional, just the promotional.

Walls of silence and incomprehension

Oulu, Northern Finland. I'm here to teach for 5 days, 2 hour sessions to Literature and Linguistics students who've never written a web page before. When I asked, 5out of 7 said they didn't consider themselves creative. At all. Yes they're sure.
Six said they did not read for pleasure, none of them ever wrote, voluntarily, anything longer than an SMS message. Except for exams, one helpfully offered, and they all nodded.
So, five two-hour sessions, including this one, to get them to write a short piece of hypertext fiction, using a pencil and Notepad, no HTML editors. Piece of cake.
I have not begun before two of them say they can't come on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and another is away Thursday and Friday, at a close friend's funeral.
Any bets on success?