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?