How do we learn to cope with life on the net? By being like destructive toddlers, says Mike Holderness. But we have to give them the toys

Want pay? Play!

One of the great mysteries of life is how we manage to take infinitely inquisitive eighteen-month-old toddlers and turn them into incurious eleven-year-olds -- and then into adults who wax imaginative in their excuses for not confronting their fear of unfamiliar technology.

"Give us training first," they cry. "Give us instructions. How do we do this, that, the other?" I do my best. But the people who are at home with technology are those who have not forgotten how to play.

The approach which works is exploratory, that of a destructively curious 18-month-old teaching herself physics: [Thinks bubble:] "What happens if I push that? Oops! Is it repeatable? Yes!!" She end up with orange juice all over the floor, again; and with another grain of understanding of how the world works.

The phrase "18-month-old teaching herself physics" produces some blank looks. No-one remembers doing it. If you don't believe it, read "Baby It's You" by developmental psychologist Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith. As she summarises: "Infants don't just explore the world. They build theories, and once a 'theory-in-action' is built, for a while children ignore counter-examples. They are like real little scientists."

Bruce Bond is "Managing Director National Business Communications" for BT. His home is, as you might expect, stuffed with technology. He tells the story of taking home the CD-ROM disk of Sesame Street. His daughter, then two-and-a-half years old, picked it up, walked over to the right computer, turned it on, inserted the disk, and confidently started playing.

Simply to write down the decisions she made, in the form of procedural instructions for a nervous adult, would take a couple of pages. To get some nervous adults to relax enough to take in this information might take weeks. To write a linear, connected narrative on using a branching, "hyper-media" work is impossible. They key is to accept that this is a new medium and to form a mental model -- any reasonable model will do -- of how it operates. What you need for that is not training, but education: philosophy is more help than arithmetic.

There is a certain kind of machismo around among those who have grasped the concepts necessary to explore. One shareware package offers "Help" on its menu bar, only to respond smugly: "Real Mac Users don't need help. [OK]"

The Internet, as the biggest technological playground, offers probably the ultimate challenge: telnet. This is capable of dumping you at someone else's operating system prompt -- neglecting to tell you what the operating system is.

For the majority of computer users, who have no effective mental model of the category "operating system", this might issue the instruction "PANIC!" in 216-point Old English. For the playful, it's another interesting challenge. (Try entering "help"; if that puzzles the other machine, try "?" or even "man man". Don't ask: do it.)

This is emphatically not a problem which will go away with friendlier interfaces: they merely shift the challenge to a different semantic level. As Jeff Morgan, National Council for Educational Technology director responsible for electronic communications, says: "In the 21st century, today's children are going to have to be able to find information from around the world -- to search, download, store and process it... information handling is the really, really important bit."

It can't be too long before you come across a Web page in Spanish (or, later, Hindi). All you can possibly do, other than panic, is to try further links until something makes sense: "What happens if I push that? Oops!"

Or, as educational psychologist Professor David Wood says: "The technology is moving at such a rate that schools face a real challenge -- I defy anyone to use their crystal ball to say what the tools will be in ten years. There's no point in teaching kids specific skills. What they need is much more exploratory activity, developing the sorts of skills which they will need to be able to play with, and make discoveries about, the new systems which they will encounter."

Anyone who can come up with a reliable remedial programme for play-impaired adults is on to a winner. An even bigger challenge is to try to ensure that today's kids do not become similarly impaired. At least among netizens, it's commonplace to predict that, in the near future, virtually all the interesting and interestingly-paid jobs will be freelance and information-based. If this is even partly true, then the kids who cannot or will not explore will be condemned to MacJobs.

New technology seems, on the face of it, to have produced a rather surprising argument for some of the principles and ideals of those derided "trendy" educationalists.

Professor Wood does warn against being too sanguine about children's' learning through exploration. He points to disappointing results with the Logo "turtle-drawing" computer system: "the idea was that kids should set their own problems and choose their own agenda. The children may produce beautiful patterns on screen but they only explore a small set of the available commands." A sense of mission seems essential -- like that provided by a boss or client demanding data now.

More, unfortunately, is needed than policy changes, challenging though those may be to conservative Ministers seeking reassurance that their 19th-century schooling was good enough for the 21st century and that everyone else can follow a rigid Curriculum all the way Back to Basics.