7 ms·

The author is correct when he writes, "The truth is, kids can't use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know" but he goes much furth

The author is correct when he writes, "The truth is, kids can't use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know" but he goes much further than I think is really necessary or even realistic. I teach at a liberal arts college and in most of my classes I devote a day or two to researching and evaluating sources. I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this? This week I had one class take an online survey and gave them a bit.ly link. I just cut and pasted it from bit.ly into notepad to make the font large enough that they could read it on the screen. In a class of ~35 I had 3-4 that were having problems. They were putting the url into google. At least one was typing in the "http://" http://" that I had just cut and pasted. Of course it was on his phone so he had to find the punctuation. THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files. Of course this is not the majority of students but it is easily 1 in 10. So whenever I see something about "digital natives" I roll my eyes. Until I have a colleague freak out about having to use the online gradebook the university is now making us use instead of a paper one because that person doesn't know how to do it.

kenning 10y ago
The other day I bought a backpack at a skateboard shop and a girl working there said she didn't own a laptop -- just a smartphone. I can absolutely see this becoming common in the near future as phones become even more useful. With a chromecast you can even watch netflix without a laptop, which takes away the main use I have for one aside from coding.
- Wofiel 10y ago
  Or the Netflix app on their smart TV, things like that will only get more common.
- dkersten 10y ago
  I already do everything except for programming on an iPad and iPhone. I can program on the iPad (by sshing into a digital ocean droplet) but it's not quite good enough for me to use exclusively. I'd happily give up using a laptop if I could make programming work comfortably for me. If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop. A phone is basically just a smaller tablet.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    > If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop. That's an interesting perspective. I've always thought of phones and tablets as being mostly collections of tools that are either specialized or focused on remote access. Almost everything that I do on my touchscreen devices relies on network access, to some degree or another.
  - z1mm32m4n 10y ago
    Until I can install arbitrary software on my phone myself from source, I will still have use for a laptop. What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell.
    - aianus 10y ago
      > What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell. You can already do this on Android no problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31564123/run-python-in-android-terminal https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31564123/run-python-in-a...
    - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
      If you're on Android, install Termux, then apt install python and an editor and you're done. The future is now :)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And then Google find some excuse to close down the account and its game over...
- foepys 10y ago
  I am currently in my bed because I am sick and can absolutely confirm this. I didn't even bother to get my laptop because my smartphone has the YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, and Amazon Video apps on it. Those are enough for me to keep me entertained without needing to have a heavy laptop on my knees, which would also require me to sit. And since Android 7 has a split screen feature I can have a YouTube video playing while I'm surfing the web. So multitasking isn't just a PC domain anymore.
- snarfy 10y ago
  As soon as I can do work on my phone, all other computers will be pointless. Imagine your phone with all of the computing power of your current desktop or laptop, with all of the same software too. If you want to work at a desktop, you could have a wireless keyboard, mouse, display, and power. This is all possible today, but the phones aren't quite there, yet.
  - s369610 10y ago
    You might like continuum from Microsoft? https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17280/windows-10-mobile-continuum https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17280/windows-10-mo...
    - snarfy 10y ago
      Yes! If my phone could run Visual Studio and PC games I wouldn't need a desktop.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    I think I might rather switch careers. Phones are terrible. They're sort of mostly tolerable when I'm just trying to kill time reading stuff on the web, or type very short messages where correct spelling is unimportant, but try to get any actual work done with a phone and it's an exercise in frustration. In order to fix all the problems with a smartphone that make it such a bad experience, you'd end up with a device that looks pretty much the same as a laptop.
- OkGoDoIt 10y ago
  I know plenty of people in their mid to late 20's who don't own real computers and just do everything from their phones. Some of them use a real computer at work but many of them don't. And this is in San Francisco, no less.
antisthenes 10y ago
Really? I would have expected to be much, much worse. If only 10% of your students are having problems with that, it's a pretty good technological aptitude overall.
mcpherrinm 10y ago
> I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this? I distinctly remember, somewhere around the 8th grade having this exact question and answer on a "How to use computers" quiz. There was also some information about how search engines can't be trusted either (you should use curated website directories!). So who is telling kids this? Their education system, and whoever decided the curriculum to mandate kids learn.
chdsbd 10y ago
I was taught in ~5th grade that you can trust a ".org, .gov, or .edu" website when looking for sources. (This was in a Massachusetts public school)
- geon 10y ago
  Did .org ever have any oversight?
  - warrenm 10y ago
    not exactly - but your used to be able to more-or-less count on it being owned/operated by a non-profit of some kind
analog31 10y ago
I teach at a liberal arts college and in most of my classes I devote a day or two to researching and evaluating sources. I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this? Their K-12 teachers are telling them this. Rather than actually teach kids how to evaluate information, it's easier to just give a set of rules. The kids are given a "rubric," which is basically a glorified worksheet, with precise details on exactly what's required. The rubric has to be precise enough that there's no way for a student to dispute the grade that they receive. The question is not which website is credible, but what you can get away with on a paper. THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files. My kids are in 9th and 11th grades, respectively. When they were in grade school, we still needed to have MS Word in the house, because some of the teachers would freeze if a file wasn't in .docx format. Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed. Today, Word is a thing of the past. The kids do everything in the cloud, and the teachers have mostly figured it out. The last remaining uses of MS Word will be in academia, for manuscripts, and in business, for documents that nobody ever reads.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed. The reason for these rules is not related to printing. These rules are in place to enable fair grading: - fixed font styling and page margins allow proper comparison of paper lengths (e.g. a student might try to use a bigger font size or bigger margins to get around a "submit 3 pages of text on issue xxx") - fixed line height requirements allow teachers to print out the submitted document and annotate it - the resulting prints and the correction marks are usually archived to make disputes easier
  - TezlaKoil 10y ago
    I don't buy this. Everyone had different handwriting in the good old days, and this did not make grading unfair. They used something called word count.
ams6110 10y ago
The worst has got to be ssh keys. Getting students (even Masters Computer Science students) to properly configure and handle ssh keys is the worst ongoing challenge I have.
- andrewprock 10y ago
  That's because there are 18 different ways to do it, and different pieces of software use different keys/formats. I can properly set up ssh, but not because it makes any sense. Similarly I can use git, despite it's best efforts to be inscrutable.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    I get that to some degree, and something like PuTTY makes it really unecessarily complicated. But really, I find that people have trouble running ssh-keygen and then finding the key and sending me the correct one (they'll often send the private key, or more likely they'll send me both "just use the one you need".)
    - Vendan 10y ago
      Oddly, to me, the full PuTTY suite is way easier to use then all the ssh stuff on Linux. PuTTYgen/Pageant makes ssh private keys just work, PuTTYgen also has the handy "open a private key, here's your public key for it" text box, that makes everything dirt obvious (of course you can export the public key as well.) And the other major SSH-based software I use (WinSCP) integrates with Pageant as well. I know all this stuff would be equally simple with Linux, but on Linux, there seems to be "use a single key" thing, whereas I prefer to have multiple keys for personal and work use, which Pageant makes trivial.
- pumblechook 10y ago
  Not just students - I experience this in the workplace too, and it just boggles my mind. We hired a recent grad, and after about 10 days of watching him type a password into a terminal ~20 times a day I casually mention how he can use ssh keys. His response? No, I'm not interested in that.
derefr 10y ago
> They were putting the url into google. Do note that on, at least, mobile Chrome, the Chrome "omnibox" is actually rendered as the Google search page's search box. Typing addresses "into Google" is how you get the browser to navigate to them. If that's the only browser you've ever used, it would be quite a surprise to find that on the school computers, the Google search box is just a search box, and there's another box up at the top of the browser window you have to use for URL entry instead.

kenning 10y ago

The other day I bought a backpack at a skateboard shop and a girl working there said she didn't own a laptop -- just a smartphone. I can absolutely see this becoming common in the near future as phones become even more useful. With a chromecast you can even watch netflix without a laptop, which takes away the main use I have for one aside from coding.

Wofiel 10y ago
Or the Netflix app on their smart TV, things like that will only get more common.
dkersten 10y ago
I already do everything except for programming on an iPad and iPhone. I can program on the iPad (by sshing into a digital ocean droplet) but it's not quite good enough for me to use exclusively. I'd happily give up using a laptop if I could make programming work comfortably for me. If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop. A phone is basically just a smaller tablet.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  > If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop. That's an interesting perspective. I've always thought of phones and tablets as being mostly collections of tools that are either specialized or focused on remote access. Almost everything that I do on my touchscreen devices relies on network access, to some degree or another.
- z1mm32m4n 10y ago
  Until I can install arbitrary software on my phone myself from source, I will still have use for a laptop. What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell.
  - aianus 10y ago
    > What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell. You can already do this on Android no problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31564123/run-python-in-android-terminal https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31564123/run-python-in-a...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
    If you're on Android, install Termux, then apt install python and an editor and you're done. The future is now :)
digi_owl 10y ago
And then Google find some excuse to close down the account and its game over...
foepys 10y ago
I am currently in my bed because I am sick and can absolutely confirm this. I didn't even bother to get my laptop because my smartphone has the YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, and Amazon Video apps on it. Those are enough for me to keep me entertained without needing to have a heavy laptop on my knees, which would also require me to sit. And since Android 7 has a split screen feature I can have a YouTube video playing while I'm surfing the web. So multitasking isn't just a PC domain anymore.
snarfy 10y ago
As soon as I can do work on my phone, all other computers will be pointless. Imagine your phone with all of the computing power of your current desktop or laptop, with all of the same software too. If you want to work at a desktop, you could have a wireless keyboard, mouse, display, and power. This is all possible today, but the phones aren't quite there, yet.
- s369610 10y ago
  You might like continuum from Microsoft? https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17280/windows-10-mobile-continuum https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17280/windows-10-mo...
  - snarfy 10y ago
    Yes! If my phone could run Visual Studio and PC games I wouldn't need a desktop.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  I think I might rather switch careers. Phones are terrible. They're sort of mostly tolerable when I'm just trying to kill time reading stuff on the web, or type very short messages where correct spelling is unimportant, but try to get any actual work done with a phone and it's an exercise in frustration. In order to fix all the problems with a smartphone that make it such a bad experience, you'd end up with a device that looks pretty much the same as a laptop.
OkGoDoIt 10y ago
I know plenty of people in their mid to late 20's who don't own real computers and just do everything from their phones. Some of them use a real computer at work but many of them don't. And this is in San Francisco, no less.

antisthenes 10y ago

Really? I would have expected to be much, much worse. If only 10% of your students are having problems with that, it's a pretty good technological aptitude overall.

mcpherrinm 10y ago

> I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this? I distinctly remember, somewhere around the 8th grade having this exact question and answer on a "How to use computers" quiz. There was also some information about how search engines can't be trusted either (you should use curated website directories!). So who is telling kids this? Their education system, and whoever decided the curriculum to mandate kids learn.

chdsbd 10y ago

I was taught in ~5th grade that you can trust a ".org, .gov, or .edu" website when looking for sources. (This was in a Massachusetts public school)

geon 10y ago
Did .org ever have any oversight?
- warrenm 10y ago
  not exactly - but your used to be able to more-or-less count on it being owned/operated by a non-profit of some kind

analog31 10y ago

I teach at a liberal arts college and in most of my classes I devote a day or two to researching and evaluating sources. I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this? Their K-12 teachers are telling them this. Rather than actually teach kids how to evaluate information, it's easier to just give a set of rules. The kids are given a "rubric," which is basically a glorified worksheet, with precise details on exactly what's required. The rubric has to be precise enough that there's no way for a student to dispute the grade that they receive. The question is not which website is credible, but what you can get away with on a paper. THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files. My kids are in 9th and 11th grades, respectively. When they were in grade school, we still needed to have MS Word in the house, because some of the teachers would freeze if a file wasn't in .docx format. Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed. Today, Word is a thing of the past. The kids do everything in the cloud, and the teachers have mostly figured it out. The last remaining uses of MS Word will be in academia, for manuscripts, and in business, for documents that nobody ever reads.

mschuster91 10y ago
> Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed. The reason for these rules is not related to printing. These rules are in place to enable fair grading: - fixed font styling and page margins allow proper comparison of paper lengths (e.g. a student might try to use a bigger font size or bigger margins to get around a "submit 3 pages of text on issue xxx") - fixed line height requirements allow teachers to print out the submitted document and annotate it - the resulting prints and the correction marks are usually archived to make disputes easier
- TezlaKoil 10y ago
  I don't buy this. Everyone had different handwriting in the good old days, and this did not make grading unfair. They used something called word count.

ams6110 10y ago

The worst has got to be ssh keys. Getting students (even Masters Computer Science students) to properly configure and handle ssh keys is the worst ongoing challenge I have.

andrewprock 10y ago
That's because there are 18 different ways to do it, and different pieces of software use different keys/formats. I can properly set up ssh, but not because it makes any sense. Similarly I can use git, despite it's best efforts to be inscrutable.
- ams6110 10y ago
  I get that to some degree, and something like PuTTY makes it really unecessarily complicated. But really, I find that people have trouble running ssh-keygen and then finding the key and sending me the correct one (they'll often send the private key, or more likely they'll send me both "just use the one you need".)
  - Vendan 10y ago
    Oddly, to me, the full PuTTY suite is way easier to use then all the ssh stuff on Linux. PuTTYgen/Pageant makes ssh private keys just work, PuTTYgen also has the handy "open a private key, here's your public key for it" text box, that makes everything dirt obvious (of course you can export the public key as well.) And the other major SSH-based software I use (WinSCP) integrates with Pageant as well. I know all this stuff would be equally simple with Linux, but on Linux, there seems to be "use a single key" thing, whereas I prefer to have multiple keys for personal and work use, which Pageant makes trivial.
pumblechook 10y ago
Not just students - I experience this in the workplace too, and it just boggles my mind. We hired a recent grad, and after about 10 days of watching him type a password into a terminal ~20 times a day I casually mention how he can use ssh keys. His response? No, I'm not interested in that.

derefr 10y ago

> They were putting the url into google. Do note that on, at least, mobile Chrome, the Chrome "omnibox" is actually rendered as the Google search page's search box. Typing addresses "into Google" is how you get the browser to navigate to them. If that's the only browser you've ever used, it would be quite a surprise to find that on the school computers, the Google search box is just a search box, and there's another box up at the top of the browser window you have to use for URL entry instead.