Just listened to the Net@Night #79 netcast (during my morning walk); this episode has a very interesting interview with Don Tapscott who is the author of “Grown up Digital” (follow-up from “Growing up Digital”) and many other insightful books about the online world and its humans. I was going to list some keywords of particular interest, but there’s just too much – the whole interview is excellent, go and listen to it already!

My first exposure to Don Tapscott was years ago (must’ve been around 2003), and quite accidental. I was teaching a MySQL training course at the University of Queensland, and walked past the uni bookstore which had a crate outside with old textbooks and other assorted stuff. I grabbed some useful resources on accounting and marketing, as well as one of Don’s books (Digital Capital).

Don has been writing about things since the late 70s. An early observation then was that executives didn’t want to learn to type, that was beneath them (they had secretaries for that, right?) and how this would “hinder” the uptake of computer use beyond secretaries (word processing and the like) and programmers. Well, now we know eh, today’s executive’s Blueberry has a keyboard, even ;-)