8 ms·

I teach at a college and I see how terrible these "digital natives" are at technology first hand. Of course not all of them but enough of them to make me laugh

I teach at a college and I see how terrible these "digital natives" are at technology first hand. Of course not all of them but enough of them to make me laugh when I hear someone say young people are a lot better at tech than old people. What is happening is that there are now different sets of skills: touchscreen skills and keyboard skills. It isn't even that they are particularly good at using phones (students say they don't see email announcements because they don't check email. I ask them why they don't set up their phone with the university email. They say they don't know how) but that they use phones more and have less experience with laptops and desktop computers (while setting up for presentations I see them struggle to log into email or google slides. They type google and enter to go to google.com, then search for youtube, then at youtube they search for the video they want to show. Strangely, when they cut and past a url they almost always right click and select paste then hit return and nearly never use "paste and go" which is right below that in the context menu. They don't know ctrl+f.) So if "digital natives" means anything, it doesn't mean that they are automatically good at tech.

freehunter 9y ago
As someone who has worked helpdesk before, all of those things are widely prevalent in every generation. Old people, middle aged people, and young people alike all google "Google" and then google "Youtube" to get to a video. Everyone sucks at logging in. Everyone finds a way that works for them and doesn't know any alternatives. The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world. Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password. And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line! There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here. Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines It's easy to brush off the millions of things that computers allow us to do that we couldn't do before because of some terrible UIs. Computers suck, the internet sucks, but the pony express and cargo boats sucked worse. I can get a message across the world in about a second. No applause for that though. No praise for the things we can now do. We're just too eager to find things we wish we could do, and blame our current technology for not knowing our dreams.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Yeah I covered that in the “we constantly lie to ourselves” part. Computers have enabled us to do wonderful things. Like criticize people we don’t know for using software in a different way than we do. Yet we, as the creators of this software, have not only enabled them to use it “incorrectly”, we’ve actively encouraged it by saying things like “it’s not the computer’s fault it doesn’t know your dreams”. If only those pesky users would just read the source code, they’d understand why this site works when you put www in front of it but doesn’t work without it! And if they want it changed, well it’s open source! They should send a pull request!
    - ketralnis 9y ago
      So how do we fix it? If we can't teach them the spells, how do we make the magic easier?
- subway 9y ago
  Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... One way to do everything robs people of their ability to think.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    There are things people should have to think about and there are things people should just be able to do without effort. I don’t want my doctor having to spend brain power figuring out how to use his new software, I want him to use is entire brain to diagnose my disease. Programmers should think. Users should just do. If users have to think about how to use their software, the developer failed at their job.
rurban 9y ago
Exactly. When I taught at the University I divided them into Mouse-skills or no mouse skills. Keyboard was easy to learn, and touchscreen or touchpad was not a thing back then. The mouse skilled people where way more advanced and picking up the taught skills much faster in the practical courses, so I had to tune the program to haptically help the novices and do only non-mouse-favoring questions in the exam. The beginners and the women were equally good in the academic skills, but the women still left from 50% down to 20% for social reasons. But in the end - in the office - the numbers were equal again, even more than 50%, so I was happy.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I would figured it the other way round. For me it seems that the mousers are the people that do not really learn what they are working with, and only click by rote. Those that know how to operate by keyboard on the other hand also know the software, as they had to discover the shortcuts somehow.
  - rurban 9y ago
    Also true. The shortcut skilled people were then followed by people how could make their own shortcuts. At the end were those who thought themselves simple macros to automate things.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Now i find myself reminded of an article on OSNews of all placed that i dug up a while back. https://www.osnews.com/print/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best_Newbie_Interface_ https://www.osnews.com/print/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Bes...
Terr_ 9y ago
I think the fundamental confusion is that risk-taking resembles competence. I believe that's what drives comments like "kids these days are so good at technology". When archetypal Aunt Tilly looks at somebody younger using a computer, she sees that they do not hesitate when navigating around, quickly clicking on everything that appears. However, that doesn't always mean they know what they are doing. They're simply much more comfortable trying and hoping that it won't end badly. (Or at least not badly in a way that they can recognize, until someone tells them that their computer is full of malware.)
- tnecniv 9y ago
  I always had the same perception growing up. When an older relative asked me to fix the TV settings or something, I had no idea what I was doing. I just clicked things that sounded reasonable until something worked out. It's almost impossible to to mess one of these devices up (other than malware) for good, but I think most people who are not very technology literate see them as precariously balanced items that crumble at the slightest touch.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Yes bricking them is hard. But as we grow older we like to have things as recall them, as that reduce cognitive load. But TVs etc are crap at reverting to last good state (as defined by user, not OEM or some automagical system). Also, last thing you want is for it to be stuck in some "useless" state when it is needed...
aphextron 9y ago
I think you're seeing the "Generation Z" effect among your students. As a Millenial, I've noticed it too. Millenials are really the only generation that "grew up" with digital technology and the internet. We had to debug viruses, worry about floppy disk compatibility, learn how to change out failed hard drives, etc. if we simply wanted to use technology at all. Whereas "Generation Z" (those too young to remember 9/11) grew up with nothing but highly polished devices like iPad and Macbook. There was a short window from the early 90's to early 2000's where you could really call someone a "digital native" IMO.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Notice the slight difference between "grew up with" and "grew up alongside". The term "digital native" was coined specifically with the former in mind, those too young to remember offline. It's a misunderstanding when "digital native" is associated with widespread tech skills, that's more a thing of the homecomputer generation.
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    Yup. This article from 2013 captured it quite well, I thought: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... "A kid puts his hand up. He tells me he's got a virus on his computer. I look at his screen. Displayed in his web-browser is what appears to be an XP dialogue box warning that his computer is infected and offering free malware scanning and removal tools. He's on a Windows 7 machine. I close the offending tab. He can't use a computer."
    - watwut 9y ago
      "Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they're lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they'll look at you as if you're speaking Klingon. [...] How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?" Why the hell do we expect kids to know things nobody ever told them that they exist? That seems to me like a more reasonable question. Kids don't know how human body works till we tell them, they don't know how to read unless we show it to them, why would we expect them to know how to reinstall operating system when no one ever used the word operating system in front of them? If no one ever show RAM to kid, the kid wont be able to react on request to change it. That is the default state, the state when a kid knows a thing is a state achieved by somebody teaching the thing to kid.
bpchaps 9y ago
Possible explanation for typing "google" instead of "google.com" - it's because autocomplete makes typing out the full URL unnecessary. I'd be willing to bet the students were running on muscle memory.
gsam 9y ago
There's definitely some research on this, and from memory they confirm your observations. The older generation actually understands what might be inside your computer far more than the newer generation. The newer generation is so detached from what they are actually using, they have no idea. As for this 'millennial' business, I think you can quite easily divide the cohort into conscious before they had access to the internet and vice-versa. This obviously varies between geographic regions, socio-economic status and a number of other factors, but from personal experience, there is a massive divide between the two.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Why I have never enjoyed the black box that Windows is, and Linux is being turned into in the name of "ease of use". DOS and earlier Linux and a more transparent and layered setup. But these days we have stuff reaching all the way from the office suite to the GPU for reasons I can only consider eyecandy.
arthurfm 9y ago
I work in a school and have found it's really easy to spot "Digital Natives" by the method they use the capitalize letters. They will almost always use Caps Lock instead of the Shift key, so rather than momentarily hold down the Shift key and press the letter they want capitalized, they will press the Caps Lock key, type the letter and then press the Caps Lock key again. Considering that there is only one Caps Lock key compared to two Shift keys I am not quite sure why they do it this way since their hand has to travel further when capitalizing letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard.
- Jack000 9y ago
  Probably because that pattern makes more sense with a touch screen keyboard.
bigger_cheese 9y ago
I think we take for granted a lot of assumed knowledge that the younger generation simply isn't taught or hasn't been required to learn. The other day one of my coworkers, a senior engineer in his 40's. Sent a simple C++ program he had written to dump some data into a CSV file to another coworker(a new graduate in her early 20's) via email. I was CC'ed. The email body simply said: Usage: convert.exe [infile] [out.csv] She stopped by my desk later in the day I mentioned in passing "How did that program work out for you?" she then complained that she couldn't work out how to supply the program with the arguments - double clicking the file did nothing for her. Turns out she had never used a command line in her life. I was shocked I grew up on the command line it boggles my mind to thing there is an entire generation who has been raised on nothing but a gui. This is quite a smart person with an (non software) engineering degree mind you.
- srean 9y ago
  That's what you get when you teach programming with an IDE.
- flukus 9y ago
  In MS land it's very common for developers to be unwilling or unable to use the command line. The two groups where this is most notable are the younger devs and the ones that come to development via the access/vb classic path. To them if something can't be done in visual studio then it can't be done. One of our code tests for hiring is writing a very simple version of grep with only a few flags like case sensitive, recursive and inverted. Of the 10 or so people that kind of completed it, not a single person seemed to understand that multiple flags could be specified (in any format).
- Clubber 9y ago
  FWIW, he should have written a simple WinForms or WPF app instead. It probably would have taken just as much time as parsing the args[] array with proper input checking. I know command line because that's all there was for a time. Windows command line is pretty horrible compared to *nix.
Clubber 9y ago
In my experience, the sweet spot for a generation being good at tech came about in the 80s and 90s, when home computers were super cheap, but didn't do much. To make them do something, you had to read the manual, a large chunk of which was about coding. The result of that is you had people as early as elementary school being exposed to programming through Commodore, TRS80s, Apples, etc. Being exposed to something so young tends to give you more understanding over time. Of course, it wasn't for everybody. Today, computer are more abundant than ever, but they already do stuff. They've, for the most part, become appliances. You have to actively seek out programming whereas before, the computer didn't do much without it. I'm a little biased though.
unkown-unknowns 9y ago
I agree completely. I sometimes think that perhaps the myth of the digital native generation arose because an insanely high percentage of the population is so illiterate with computers that they think that just because the kids are spending all of their time in front of screens it means that those kids automatically "understand" computers when in fact they are just learning very specific applications of computers. I also think it's a bit of a cop out on their part (not sure that it's the right word). The computer illiterate are so turned off by the idea of trying to understand computers that they will gladly throw compliments at any kid just so that the kids will shut up about anything relating to computers. "Oh ho ho, I'm so old you know I don't know anything about them computers and phones and what have ya. But you kids, you grew up with these things, so to you they are second nature." Edit: Sibling commenter about millennial vs gen z has a good point. Still I think that it's mostly those of us that made an effort to learn that it goes for though, just like with the people that grew up before that with home computers.

freehunter 9y ago

As someone who has worked helpdesk before, all of those things are widely prevalent in every generation. Old people, middle aged people, and young people alike all google "Google" and then google "Youtube" to get to a video. Everyone sucks at logging in. Everyone finds a way that works for them and doesn't know any alternatives. The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world. Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password. And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line! There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here. Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines It's easy to brush off the millions of things that computers allow us to do that we couldn't do before because of some terrible UIs. Computers suck, the internet sucks, but the pony express and cargo boats sucked worse. I can get a message across the world in about a second. No applause for that though. No praise for the things we can now do. We're just too eager to find things we wish we could do, and blame our current technology for not knowing our dreams.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Yeah I covered that in the “we constantly lie to ourselves” part. Computers have enabled us to do wonderful things. Like criticize people we don’t know for using software in a different way than we do. Yet we, as the creators of this software, have not only enabled them to use it “incorrectly”, we’ve actively encouraged it by saying things like “it’s not the computer’s fault it doesn’t know your dreams”. If only those pesky users would just read the source code, they’d understand why this site works when you put www in front of it but doesn’t work without it! And if they want it changed, well it’s open source! They should send a pull request!
  - ketralnis 9y ago
    So how do we fix it? If we can't teach them the spells, how do we make the magic easier?
subway 9y ago
Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... One way to do everything robs people of their ability to think.
- freehunter 9y ago
  There are things people should have to think about and there are things people should just be able to do without effort. I don’t want my doctor having to spend brain power figuring out how to use his new software, I want him to use is entire brain to diagnose my disease. Programmers should think. Users should just do. If users have to think about how to use their software, the developer failed at their job.

rurban 9y ago

Exactly. When I taught at the University I divided them into Mouse-skills or no mouse skills. Keyboard was easy to learn, and touchscreen or touchpad was not a thing back then. The mouse skilled people where way more advanced and picking up the taught skills much faster in the practical courses, so I had to tune the program to haptically help the novices and do only non-mouse-favoring questions in the exam. The beginners and the women were equally good in the academic skills, but the women still left from 50% down to 20% for social reasons. But in the end - in the office - the numbers were equal again, even more than 50%, so I was happy.

digi_owl 9y ago
I would figured it the other way round. For me it seems that the mousers are the people that do not really learn what they are working with, and only click by rote. Those that know how to operate by keyboard on the other hand also know the software, as they had to discover the shortcuts somehow.
- rurban 9y ago
  Also true. The shortcut skilled people were then followed by people how could make their own shortcuts. At the end were those who thought themselves simple macros to automate things.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Now i find myself reminded of an article on OSNews of all placed that i dug up a while back. https://www.osnews.com/print/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best_Newbie_Interface_ https://www.osnews.com/print/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Bes...

Terr_ 9y ago

I think the fundamental confusion is that risk-taking resembles competence. I believe that's what drives comments like "kids these days are so good at technology". When archetypal Aunt Tilly looks at somebody younger using a computer, she sees that they do not hesitate when navigating around, quickly clicking on everything that appears. However, that doesn't always mean they know what they are doing. They're simply much more comfortable trying and hoping that it won't end badly. (Or at least not badly in a way that they can recognize, until someone tells them that their computer is full of malware.)

tnecniv 9y ago
I always had the same perception growing up. When an older relative asked me to fix the TV settings or something, I had no idea what I was doing. I just clicked things that sounded reasonable until something worked out. It's almost impossible to to mess one of these devices up (other than malware) for good, but I think most people who are not very technology literate see them as precariously balanced items that crumble at the slightest touch.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Yes bricking them is hard. But as we grow older we like to have things as recall them, as that reduce cognitive load. But TVs etc are crap at reverting to last good state (as defined by user, not OEM or some automagical system). Also, last thing you want is for it to be stuck in some "useless" state when it is needed...

aphextron 9y ago

I think you're seeing the "Generation Z" effect among your students. As a Millenial, I've noticed it too. Millenials are really the only generation that "grew up" with digital technology and the internet. We had to debug viruses, worry about floppy disk compatibility, learn how to change out failed hard drives, etc. if we simply wanted to use technology at all. Whereas "Generation Z" (those too young to remember 9/11) grew up with nothing but highly polished devices like iPad and Macbook. There was a short window from the early 90's to early 2000's where you could really call someone a "digital native" IMO.

usrusr 9y ago
Notice the slight difference between "grew up with" and "grew up alongside". The term "digital native" was coined specifically with the former in mind, those too young to remember offline. It's a misunderstanding when "digital native" is associated with widespread tech skills, that's more a thing of the homecomputer generation.
- FooHentai 9y ago
  Yup. This article from 2013 captured it quite well, I thought: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... "A kid puts his hand up. He tells me he's got a virus on his computer. I look at his screen. Displayed in his web-browser is what appears to be an XP dialogue box warning that his computer is infected and offering free malware scanning and removal tools. He's on a Windows 7 machine. I close the offending tab. He can't use a computer."
  - watwut 9y ago
    "Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they're lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they'll look at you as if you're speaking Klingon. [...] How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?" Why the hell do we expect kids to know things nobody ever told them that they exist? That seems to me like a more reasonable question. Kids don't know how human body works till we tell them, they don't know how to read unless we show it to them, why would we expect them to know how to reinstall operating system when no one ever used the word operating system in front of them? If no one ever show RAM to kid, the kid wont be able to react on request to change it. That is the default state, the state when a kid knows a thing is a state achieved by somebody teaching the thing to kid.

bpchaps 9y ago

Possible explanation for typing "google" instead of "google.com" - it's because autocomplete makes typing out the full URL unnecessary. I'd be willing to bet the students were running on muscle memory.

gsam 9y ago

There's definitely some research on this, and from memory they confirm your observations. The older generation actually understands what might be inside your computer far more than the newer generation. The newer generation is so detached from what they are actually using, they have no idea. As for this 'millennial' business, I think you can quite easily divide the cohort into conscious before they had access to the internet and vice-versa. This obviously varies between geographic regions, socio-economic status and a number of other factors, but from personal experience, there is a massive divide between the two.

digi_owl 9y ago
Why I have never enjoyed the black box that Windows is, and Linux is being turned into in the name of "ease of use". DOS and earlier Linux and a more transparent and layered setup. But these days we have stuff reaching all the way from the office suite to the GPU for reasons I can only consider eyecandy.

arthurfm 9y ago

I work in a school and have found it's really easy to spot "Digital Natives" by the method they use the capitalize letters. They will almost always use Caps Lock instead of the Shift key, so rather than momentarily hold down the Shift key and press the letter they want capitalized, they will press the Caps Lock key, type the letter and then press the Caps Lock key again. Considering that there is only one Caps Lock key compared to two Shift keys I am not quite sure why they do it this way since their hand has to travel further when capitalizing letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard.

Jack000 9y ago
Probably because that pattern makes more sense with a touch screen keyboard.

bigger_cheese 9y ago

I think we take for granted a lot of assumed knowledge that the younger generation simply isn't taught or hasn't been required to learn. The other day one of my coworkers, a senior engineer in his 40's. Sent a simple C++ program he had written to dump some data into a CSV file to another coworker(a new graduate in her early 20's) via email. I was CC'ed. The email body simply said: Usage: convert.exe [infile] [out.csv] She stopped by my desk later in the day I mentioned in passing "How did that program work out for you?" she then complained that she couldn't work out how to supply the program with the arguments - double clicking the file did nothing for her. Turns out she had never used a command line in her life. I was shocked I grew up on the command line it boggles my mind to thing there is an entire generation who has been raised on nothing but a gui. This is quite a smart person with an (non software) engineering degree mind you.

srean 9y ago
That's what you get when you teach programming with an IDE.
flukus 9y ago
In MS land it's very common for developers to be unwilling or unable to use the command line. The two groups where this is most notable are the younger devs and the ones that come to development via the access/vb classic path. To them if something can't be done in visual studio then it can't be done. One of our code tests for hiring is writing a very simple version of grep with only a few flags like case sensitive, recursive and inverted. Of the 10 or so people that kind of completed it, not a single person seemed to understand that multiple flags could be specified (in any format).
Clubber 9y ago
FWIW, he should have written a simple WinForms or WPF app instead. It probably would have taken just as much time as parsing the args[] array with proper input checking. I know command line because that's all there was for a time. Windows command line is pretty horrible compared to *nix.

Clubber 9y ago

In my experience, the sweet spot for a generation being good at tech came about in the 80s and 90s, when home computers were super cheap, but didn't do much. To make them do something, you had to read the manual, a large chunk of which was about coding. The result of that is you had people as early as elementary school being exposed to programming through Commodore, TRS80s, Apples, etc. Being exposed to something so young tends to give you more understanding over time. Of course, it wasn't for everybody. Today, computer are more abundant than ever, but they already do stuff. They've, for the most part, become appliances. You have to actively seek out programming whereas before, the computer didn't do much without it. I'm a little biased though.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago

I agree completely. I sometimes think that perhaps the myth of the digital native generation arose because an insanely high percentage of the population is so illiterate with computers that they think that just because the kids are spending all of their time in front of screens it means that those kids automatically "understand" computers when in fact they are just learning very specific applications of computers. I also think it's a bit of a cop out on their part (not sure that it's the right word). The computer illiterate are so turned off by the idea of trying to understand computers that they will gladly throw compliments at any kid just so that the kids will shut up about anything relating to computers. "Oh ho ho, I'm so old you know I don't know anything about them computers and phones and what have ya. But you kids, you grew up with these things, so to you they are second nature." Edit: Sibling commenter about millennial vs gen z has a good point. Still I think that it's mostly those of us that made an effort to learn that it goes for though, just like with the people that grew up before that with home computers.