8 ms·

Kids might be digital natives – but a study shows they aren’t computer literate

69 points by Teever 6y ago

pca006132 6y ago
IMO this is not a problem with education alone. I think in order to be information literate, one requires a lot reading. However, the apps/websites now are promoting shorter attention span, feeding them with information that stimulates their reward pathway, it would be hard to focus with reading. And this is not only for kids, I find myself much harder to focus on reading long articles/books now.
jgwil2 6y ago
More information on the assessment a couple clicks away[0]: > ICILS 2018 assesses two dimensions of an individual's skills with information communications technologies. The first dimension, computer and information literacy, focuses on understanding computer use, gathering information, producing information, and communicating digitally. The second dimension, computational thinking, focuses on conceptualizing problems and operationalizing solutions. > Computational thinking is the style of thinking used when programming a computer or developing an application for another type of digital device. However, its usefulness extends beyond this. The reasoning strategies that underlie computational thinking can help make sense of complex ideas and solve problems. Seems that the first dimension constitutes the ubiquitous use of computers in school for research, word processing, etc. The second dimension is what we would expect kids to learn in an introductory computer science class. I'm not surprised that the latter skill is lacking but that only 19% of students were able to use computers for information gathering and management is rather shocking. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/icils/about.asp https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/icils/about.asp
- salawat 6y ago
  Not to me. I think those of us that learned the art of the search engine before Search Engine Optimization had an environment to learn fundamental skills in that has all but disappeared in the adversarial rush for top search result. I can't say as any of the kids I know have even shown an inkling of awareness on how to do research at all. I just see a bunch of online sources being attributed to in the locality I live in. Yet when I was in school, you were trained, and expected to delve into online, periodical, book, magazine, film, archive, you name it. Those skills, and navigating systems of information organization are critical to creating the pre-requisite intution for composing boolean logic in arbitrarily advanced ways. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for kids now to find things when there is an entire industry focused around exploiting/manipulating the overall information index of the Internet. Nevermind for evaluating the resulting content for usefulness or veracity.
doctorshady 6y ago
This is indicative in how user interfaces are made as well. Every generation of Windows for example, falls further into the direction of treating users like a liability rather than a computer's owner. If you were to throw a relatively cryptic and unabstracted machine in front of a bunch of five year olds, like a Commodore 64, they would probably both eventually figure it out and be better for it.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  My dad has a favourite story about me at age 3 being able to load a floppy disk into the Apple II, turn it on, load Robot Odyssey, and get past the first level. All by failing hundreds of times, never getting frustrated, and watching my 10 year old brother doing it. When my son was 2 I had high expectations and he still surprised me with how relentless he was at fuzzing the iPad. He doesn't understand what any words of symbols mean but he knows how to navigate it. At 3 he can mouse and keyboard his way into youtube and search for "trains" without being able to tell me whay that word means. I'm so glad he's thriving with a mouse and keyboard. I worried a bit that he was doomed to be a touch screen computer user.
  - doctorshady 6y ago
    Nice! When I was really young (maybe four, five?) I wound up having to replace the disk drive/card pair on an Apple II. What should've taken most people maybe ten minutes was an ordeal, but the feeling of accomplishment doing that was still really awesome. I'd expect the same is true of old cars, and whatever else; even if you're tinkering with things initially out of necessity, if you're determined enough to pull through, the experience may wind up being an investment in and of itself.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  I don't think that's solely on developers. Companies try to "penetrate" the market as much as possible as cheaply as possible. They take away power from power users because it is just too much effort for them for too small a number of people. Do your job of being our product and make as little fuss as possible.
rektide 6y ago
> Some may rush to blame teachers and call for their additional training as a way to address this alarming finding. Instead, the work must begin with school leaders, to lay the groundwork for teachers’ success. Wrong. Everything here is wrong. This article is wrong in every way, about everything. This tension is wrong. The blame is at our feet. Techies. Tech industry. This is malignant systems that the poor world keeps stumbling into, anti-Enlightenment consumerware, a tar-pit that sucks away understanding. This is the cloud. This is what the cloud wants, this is what mainframes want: ignorant, dumb, useless consumers, addicted to shovelware product & Services as a Software Substitutes (SaaSS). There's countless problems with Steve Jobs, but once upon a time he got it: > And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. But we are not using computers to expand the mind, to help us roam. We are hiding the computers. We are burying the treasured free-wheeling perspective. We are consumerizing, addicting, making "user friendly" systems at the expense of any honest engagement with computing & systems. Our metrics focus on easy adoption, on how long we keep precious eye-balls attached & engaged. We do not help the user go where they might, in a lightweight adaptable vehicle: we shuttle them about, strapped tightly into well-tested thoroughly designed user-experience vessels on programmed user-experience rails. In the cloud, every system is unlearnable. There are opaque expert intelligences at every corner, algorithms, deciding what we do and do not experience, and we have no insight into those systems. Knowledge of one app/cloud/system convey no useful expectations or knowledge of another system. All systems are remote, far off, unexploreable, unlearnable. Google, champion of the web, builds countless systems where there are no URLs, where middle clicking doesn't work: Google Play Music, Google Calendar, Youtube Music. Anti-hyper-links, app-links: the old narrow shitty things that defy commonality. Narrow, cloistered, prescribed paths are the only options, the only networking we are afforded. Access to data is only via well-regulated deeply-deeply-intermediated interfaces that we users have no say over. The digital has become that which is unknowable. Weep, techies, our progress has brought unknownable unlearnable din & confinement. What we have brought is the opposite of the potential & promise we carried. We have taken the tools of infinite liberty & freedom & with them we have built the hardest of iron cages.
- yvdriess 6y ago
ashtonkem 6y ago
I keep repeating this: every generation after 1940 or so has known how to drive, yet most people are not mechanics. The ability to operate a machine and knowing how it actually works are completely separate.
- jgwil2 6y ago
  Hmm, I would say that cars and computers are pretty different in that a computer is a programmable machine. A car can only do one thing; a computer can do many things. If you don't know how to program, you are confined to using only those programs that others have written for you. In some sense you cannot realize the potential of the machine without this ability.
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
    Cars can do many things these days. I hear you can play videogames on a Tesla.
    - jgwil2 6y ago
      Yeah... because they have computers inside them.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    This metaphor can be extended the opposite direction. Most people could get much better performance out of their car by training regularly. Isn't a racecar driver a much better driver than your average commuter? Yet you'll notice that while some people take the occasional racing car class for funsies, the actual number of racecar drivers (hobby or professional) is very small. The issue is opportunity cost. Most people have other things they'd rather be doing, so they learn the minimum they need to accomplish their tasks and get on with it. Fundamentally, most of us who know how computers work deeply didn't learn how to do all this stuff to use computers better, we did it because we enjoyed it. Not everyone enjoys learning how computers work, and that's ok.
    - 6y ago
carlmr 6y ago
>kids’ ubiquitous attachment to computers for social and gaming uses is often presumed to simply transfer to using technology to work with information and transform it in ways critical for the 21st Century workplaces This strikes me as so naïve. By which mechanism does swiping through YouTube, TikTok or whatever the newest fad is, confer knowledge about technology. Some kind of brain osmosis? Looking back to my childhood I grew up with both parents working in software. I learned to type on a typewriter and later a computer, played video games, and fixed or reinstalled Windows and it's drivers hundreds of times. My parents even taught me a little basic. I was always amazed about the huge amount of abstraction that was there, I learned how a few things worked, but when my dad explained something, I'd often think "wow there are so many layers to this, if I'd grown up earlier I'd maybe have a chance to learn all this." I did learn a lot about some of these layers in the meantime, but the number of layers has only grown. We barely even use native applications nowadays, everything is a tower of babel of abstraction layers. The second aspect to this is the UX revolution. We expect every app to be self-explanatory nowadays. Nobody reads the manuals. Everything just works. If you learned how to use an iPhone you haven't learned much. This is because the user experience is packaged so naturally that most people barely need to think about it. Maybe you've learned about the design language used, what a burger menu usually represents. What the home button does. After all single-button mice seemed like a constraint to Windows users, single button phones have become the norm. The app stores have made it hard to screw up your system. Drivers nowadays just work. Many families don't have a device with a keyboard at home, so you don't learn to type. I think the digital natives might have a good intuition of UX, but we failed to give them a chance to fall and learn about the technology stack because the user experience is easy nowadays. We've created perfect digital consumers. As producers they may be near illiterate though.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  > This strikes me as so naïve. By which mechanism does swiping through YouTube, TikTok or whatever the newest fad is, confer knowledge about technology. Some kind of brain osmosis? A lot of very powerful people in technology (who have a vested interest in selling something) have been stating this as fact for so long that many people have just accepted it as truth.
csense 6y ago
If you were born between the early 1980's and the mid-1990's, you probably have more technical know-how than those born earlier or later. That's because during the years 1990-2005, tech had penetrated much of the population, but it was rough around the edges enough that you had to understand it if you wanted to get it working. Take modems. In the '90s have a dial-up modem that allowed a single computer to connect at a time over the phone line. You had to manually initiate and hang up your Internet connection, and you couldn't use it on more than one computer at a time. That process forced you to understand a bit of how the Internet works in order to use it. Now the Internet's just this magic thing that you have all the time if you just plug in a thing and pay the bill. I've noticed a lot of people use the words "Wifi," "router," "modem," and "Internet connection" interchangeably. The details are hidden from a user in a way they weren't in the days of dialup. Likewise, DOS. Before Windows moved away from DOS, you sometimes needed to work with the command line. Occasionally you had to create boot disks for your software that would load different drivers and stuff. Again, you had to know something about the command line and system configuration in order to use the computer effectively. I guess what it really boils down to: In my day we walked to school in a blizzard every day, uphill both ways. Now get off my lawn, whippersnappers. (Although when I was a student one professor regaled the class with tales of his first computer, some early home computer -- I don't think he ever told us the model, but it may have been Z80-based -- whose unboxing procedure involved some quality time with a soldering iron, and if you wanted to use permanent tape storage you had to toggle in a tape driver using a switch panel directly connected to the bus lines. Maybe every generation of tech enthusiasts has its own "kids these days are soft, in my day we walked uphill both ways" story.)
- SecurityLagoon 6y ago
  Agree after that period where you stopped needing to manually install drivers and configure things I'm sure tech literacy dropped off - there is no reason to know how your technology works these days (to survive) unless you like tinkering. I am sure it is the same in other technological areas too - I grew up fixing the family cars and now it seems every minor problem goes to the garage. I think black boxes are just the norm now - I'm guessing there are large portions, both young and old, of the population who don't use the internet outside of a smartphone or tablet which they use until it breaks or slows down and replace with another magical app machine. No understanding of tech required. I've only noticed the use of WiFi to mean Internet pretty recently. Its thoroughly confusing when you are trying to trouble shoot WiFi problems for someone and you realise their WiFi is working fine - their ISP just has an outage. I'd say this is a modern problem but I remember people calling the computer tower the CPU for as long as I can remember.
unicornporn 6y ago
On this topic, a must read: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
- watwut 6y ago
  I found that article insufferable.
dagorenouf 6y ago
The flip side: the doomsday prediction that everybody will know how to code one day will likely not happen. Yay! My skill set is gonna remain valuable for a while :)
- Snetry 6y ago
  We'll have AI that codes for us before everyone knows how to code
mensetmanusman 6y ago
It turns out that when you abstract away the complexity of a system, people have no idea how it works. This is also true of modern vehicles. Who cheers when realizing that the motion of Li+ ions moving across a 10 micron thick polymer membrane pulls electrons into a swirly motion through the atomic orbitals of copper to create an electromagnetic wind that can propel tires to spin fast enough to get you from 0-60 in 2 seconds. (I do)
- qu-everything 6y ago
  tldr; a battery can power a DC engine with some copper coils magic.
qalmakka 6y ago
The first users of computers _had_ to acquire skills in order to get the machine to do whatever they wanted it to do. If you didn't learn how to use the CLI, you couldn't use DOS, for instance. You needed basic computer skills for doing even the simplest thing (remember how pleasant was installing a CD-ROM driver in MSDOS?). Growing up, I had no internet, and the only stuff I could do with my computer was tinkering, buying books and magazines, and experiment. Nowadays you have the internet and an infinite amount of entertainment coming in as soon as you open a browser, so you don't really get a chance to get bored anymore. Most kids nowadays will grow up with extremely limited machines, like iPads or Chromebooks, so they won't have a chance to do stuff we could do only because our technology was much less sophisticated. Owning a PC is something that's not mandatory anymore in order to do any sort of computing. The newer generations will know very well what a computer does, but will have a much harder time learning _how_ it does it.
finnthehuman 6y ago
This should be obvious to anyone who has kids or works with kids. But they're all functional illiterates too, and mistake kids' greater determination to fight through the unknown as competence. And they're soaking in a culture that makes them make terrible choices with tech. It's so unfashionable to use a laptop instead of a phone that many are steadfast in their desire to do schoolwork by typing on their phones. Suggest that it'd be faster, easier and more comfortable if they just used a computer and you're a grandpa. I was in a classroom where CAD was being taught and some students kept trying to switch to using OnShape on their phones until they were forced to use the computers.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
(2019)
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
There's been discussion on here about this before, some of the more techie types on here wondering why ppl don't know basic stuff about insides of machines, filesystems etc. (I get it/the frustration is real) But this is all part of a general change in computing to mainstream/consumer devices from what it was before and companies like Apple definitely have pushed it far in that direction with closed off OS systems that don't let/want you to see how anything works or change anything like settings, the malleability, and closed wall garden systems that iOS brought us. Android too obviously, but much less so. It's tough it's just the world the youth have grown up in but also in certain pockets there's a light (if you think ppl need to know more) where there's more experimentation and access and exploration in STEM areas etc. More access and information to the niche worlds of creating/tinkering etc than multiple generations before could dream of. Here's to positivity that it continues to bring bright leaders to the fore
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

69 points by Teever 6y ago

IMO this is not a problem with education alone. I think in order to be information literate, one requires a lot reading. However, the apps/websites now are promoting shorter attention span, feeding them with information that stimulates their reward pathway, it would be hard to focus with reading. And this is not only for kids, I find myself much harder to focus on reading long articles/books now.

jgwil2 6y ago

More information on the assessment a couple clicks away[0]: > ICILS 2018 assesses two dimensions of an individual's skills with information communications technologies. The first dimension, computer and information literacy, focuses on understanding computer use, gathering information, producing information, and communicating digitally. The second dimension, computational thinking, focuses on conceptualizing problems and operationalizing solutions. > Computational thinking is the style of thinking used when programming a computer or developing an application for another type of digital device. However, its usefulness extends beyond this. The reasoning strategies that underlie computational thinking can help make sense of complex ideas and solve problems. Seems that the first dimension constitutes the ubiquitous use of computers in school for research, word processing, etc. The second dimension is what we would expect kids to learn in an introductory computer science class. I'm not surprised that the latter skill is lacking but that only 19% of students were able to use computers for information gathering and management is rather shocking. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/icils/about.asp https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/icils/about.asp

salawat 6y ago
Not to me. I think those of us that learned the art of the search engine before Search Engine Optimization had an environment to learn fundamental skills in that has all but disappeared in the adversarial rush for top search result. I can't say as any of the kids I know have even shown an inkling of awareness on how to do research at all. I just see a bunch of online sources being attributed to in the locality I live in. Yet when I was in school, you were trained, and expected to delve into online, periodical, book, magazine, film, archive, you name it. Those skills, and navigating systems of information organization are critical to creating the pre-requisite intution for composing boolean logic in arbitrarily advanced ways. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for kids now to find things when there is an entire industry focused around exploiting/manipulating the overall information index of the Internet. Nevermind for evaluating the resulting content for usefulness or veracity.

doctorshady 6y ago

This is indicative in how user interfaces are made as well. Every generation of Windows for example, falls further into the direction of treating users like a liability rather than a computer's owner. If you were to throw a relatively cryptic and unabstracted machine in front of a bunch of five year olds, like a Commodore 64, they would probably both eventually figure it out and be better for it.

Waterluvian 6y ago
My dad has a favourite story about me at age 3 being able to load a floppy disk into the Apple II, turn it on, load Robot Odyssey, and get past the first level. All by failing hundreds of times, never getting frustrated, and watching my 10 year old brother doing it. When my son was 2 I had high expectations and he still surprised me with how relentless he was at fuzzing the iPad. He doesn't understand what any words of symbols mean but he knows how to navigate it. At 3 he can mouse and keyboard his way into youtube and search for "trains" without being able to tell me whay that word means. I'm so glad he's thriving with a mouse and keyboard. I worried a bit that he was doomed to be a touch screen computer user.
- doctorshady 6y ago
  Nice! When I was really young (maybe four, five?) I wound up having to replace the disk drive/card pair on an Apple II. What should've taken most people maybe ten minutes was an ordeal, but the feeling of accomplishment doing that was still really awesome. I'd expect the same is true of old cars, and whatever else; even if you're tinkering with things initially out of necessity, if you're determined enough to pull through, the experience may wind up being an investment in and of itself.
lmilcin 6y ago
I don't think that's solely on developers. Companies try to "penetrate" the market as much as possible as cheaply as possible. They take away power from power users because it is just too much effort for them for too small a number of people. Do your job of being our product and make as little fuss as possible.

rektide 6y ago

> Some may rush to blame teachers and call for their additional training as a way to address this alarming finding. Instead, the work must begin with school leaders, to lay the groundwork for teachers’ success. Wrong. Everything here is wrong. This article is wrong in every way, about everything. This tension is wrong. The blame is at our feet. Techies. Tech industry. This is malignant systems that the poor world keeps stumbling into, anti-Enlightenment consumerware, a tar-pit that sucks away understanding. This is the cloud. This is what the cloud wants, this is what mainframes want: ignorant, dumb, useless consumers, addicted to shovelware product & Services as a Software Substitutes (SaaSS). There's countless problems with Steve Jobs, but once upon a time he got it: > And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. But we are not using computers to expand the mind, to help us roam. We are hiding the computers. We are burying the treasured free-wheeling perspective. We are consumerizing, addicting, making "user friendly" systems at the expense of any honest engagement with computing & systems. Our metrics focus on easy adoption, on how long we keep precious eye-balls attached & engaged. We do not help the user go where they might, in a lightweight adaptable vehicle: we shuttle them about, strapped tightly into well-tested thoroughly designed user-experience vessels on programmed user-experience rails. In the cloud, every system is unlearnable. There are opaque expert intelligences at every corner, algorithms, deciding what we do and do not experience, and we have no insight into those systems. Knowledge of one app/cloud/system convey no useful expectations or knowledge of another system. All systems are remote, far off, unexploreable, unlearnable. Google, champion of the web, builds countless systems where there are no URLs, where middle clicking doesn't work: Google Play Music, Google Calendar, Youtube Music. Anti-hyper-links, app-links: the old narrow shitty things that defy commonality. Narrow, cloistered, prescribed paths are the only options, the only networking we are afforded. Access to data is only via well-regulated deeply-deeply-intermediated interfaces that we users have no say over. The digital has become that which is unknowable. Weep, techies, our progress has brought unknownable unlearnable din & confinement. What we have brought is the opposite of the potential & promise we carried. We have taken the tools of infinite liberty & freedom & with them we have built the hardest of iron cages.

yvdriess 6y ago

ashtonkem 6y ago

I keep repeating this: every generation after 1940 or so has known how to drive, yet most people are not mechanics. The ability to operate a machine and knowing how it actually works are completely separate.

jgwil2 6y ago
Hmm, I would say that cars and computers are pretty different in that a computer is a programmable machine. A car can only do one thing; a computer can do many things. If you don't know how to program, you are confined to using only those programs that others have written for you. In some sense you cannot realize the potential of the machine without this ability.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  Cars can do many things these days. I hear you can play videogames on a Tesla.
  - jgwil2 6y ago
    Yeah... because they have computers inside them.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  This metaphor can be extended the opposite direction. Most people could get much better performance out of their car by training regularly. Isn't a racecar driver a much better driver than your average commuter? Yet you'll notice that while some people take the occasional racing car class for funsies, the actual number of racecar drivers (hobby or professional) is very small. The issue is opportunity cost. Most people have other things they'd rather be doing, so they learn the minimum they need to accomplish their tasks and get on with it. Fundamentally, most of us who know how computers work deeply didn't learn how to do all this stuff to use computers better, we did it because we enjoyed it. Not everyone enjoys learning how computers work, and that's ok.
  - 6y ago

carlmr 6y ago

>kids’ ubiquitous attachment to computers for social and gaming uses is often presumed to simply transfer to using technology to work with information and transform it in ways critical for the 21st Century workplaces This strikes me as so naïve. By which mechanism does swiping through YouTube, TikTok or whatever the newest fad is, confer knowledge about technology. Some kind of brain osmosis? Looking back to my childhood I grew up with both parents working in software. I learned to type on a typewriter and later a computer, played video games, and fixed or reinstalled Windows and it's drivers hundreds of times. My parents even taught me a little basic. I was always amazed about the huge amount of abstraction that was there, I learned how a few things worked, but when my dad explained something, I'd often think "wow there are so many layers to this, if I'd grown up earlier I'd maybe have a chance to learn all this." I did learn a lot about some of these layers in the meantime, but the number of layers has only grown. We barely even use native applications nowadays, everything is a tower of babel of abstraction layers. The second aspect to this is the UX revolution. We expect every app to be self-explanatory nowadays. Nobody reads the manuals. Everything just works. If you learned how to use an iPhone you haven't learned much. This is because the user experience is packaged so naturally that most people barely need to think about it. Maybe you've learned about the design language used, what a burger menu usually represents. What the home button does. After all single-button mice seemed like a constraint to Windows users, single button phones have become the norm. The app stores have made it hard to screw up your system. Drivers nowadays just work. Many families don't have a device with a keyboard at home, so you don't learn to type. I think the digital natives might have a good intuition of UX, but we failed to give them a chance to fall and learn about the technology stack because the user experience is easy nowadays. We've created perfect digital consumers. As producers they may be near illiterate though.

OldHand2018 6y ago
> This strikes me as so naïve. By which mechanism does swiping through YouTube, TikTok or whatever the newest fad is, confer knowledge about technology. Some kind of brain osmosis? A lot of very powerful people in technology (who have a vested interest in selling something) have been stating this as fact for so long that many people have just accepted it as truth.

csense 6y ago

If you were born between the early 1980's and the mid-1990's, you probably have more technical know-how than those born earlier or later. That's because during the years 1990-2005, tech had penetrated much of the population, but it was rough around the edges enough that you had to understand it if you wanted to get it working. Take modems. In the '90s have a dial-up modem that allowed a single computer to connect at a time over the phone line. You had to manually initiate and hang up your Internet connection, and you couldn't use it on more than one computer at a time. That process forced you to understand a bit of how the Internet works in order to use it. Now the Internet's just this magic thing that you have all the time if you just plug in a thing and pay the bill. I've noticed a lot of people use the words "Wifi," "router," "modem," and "Internet connection" interchangeably. The details are hidden from a user in a way they weren't in the days of dialup. Likewise, DOS. Before Windows moved away from DOS, you sometimes needed to work with the command line. Occasionally you had to create boot disks for your software that would load different drivers and stuff. Again, you had to know something about the command line and system configuration in order to use the computer effectively. I guess what it really boils down to: In my day we walked to school in a blizzard every day, uphill both ways. Now get off my lawn, whippersnappers. (Although when I was a student one professor regaled the class with tales of his first computer, some early home computer -- I don't think he ever told us the model, but it may have been Z80-based -- whose unboxing procedure involved some quality time with a soldering iron, and if you wanted to use permanent tape storage you had to toggle in a tape driver using a switch panel directly connected to the bus lines. Maybe every generation of tech enthusiasts has its own "kids these days are soft, in my day we walked uphill both ways" story.)

SecurityLagoon 6y ago
Agree after that period where you stopped needing to manually install drivers and configure things I'm sure tech literacy dropped off - there is no reason to know how your technology works these days (to survive) unless you like tinkering. I am sure it is the same in other technological areas too - I grew up fixing the family cars and now it seems every minor problem goes to the garage. I think black boxes are just the norm now - I'm guessing there are large portions, both young and old, of the population who don't use the internet outside of a smartphone or tablet which they use until it breaks or slows down and replace with another magical app machine. No understanding of tech required. I've only noticed the use of WiFi to mean Internet pretty recently. Its thoroughly confusing when you are trying to trouble shoot WiFi problems for someone and you realise their WiFi is working fine - their ISP just has an outage. I'd say this is a modern problem but I remember people calling the computer tower the CPU for as long as I can remember.

unicornporn 6y ago

On this topic, a must read: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

watwut 6y ago
I found that article insufferable.

dagorenouf 6y ago

The flip side: the doomsday prediction that everybody will know how to code one day will likely not happen. Yay! My skill set is gonna remain valuable for a while :)

Snetry 6y ago
We'll have AI that codes for us before everyone knows how to code

mensetmanusman 6y ago

It turns out that when you abstract away the complexity of a system, people have no idea how it works. This is also true of modern vehicles. Who cheers when realizing that the motion of Li+ ions moving across a 10 micron thick polymer membrane pulls electrons into a swirly motion through the atomic orbitals of copper to create an electromagnetic wind that can propel tires to spin fast enough to get you from 0-60 in 2 seconds. (I do)

qu-everything 6y ago
tldr; a battery can power a DC engine with some copper coils magic.

qalmakka 6y ago

The first users of computers _had_ to acquire skills in order to get the machine to do whatever they wanted it to do. If you didn't learn how to use the CLI, you couldn't use DOS, for instance. You needed basic computer skills for doing even the simplest thing (remember how pleasant was installing a CD-ROM driver in MSDOS?). Growing up, I had no internet, and the only stuff I could do with my computer was tinkering, buying books and magazines, and experiment. Nowadays you have the internet and an infinite amount of entertainment coming in as soon as you open a browser, so you don't really get a chance to get bored anymore. Most kids nowadays will grow up with extremely limited machines, like iPads or Chromebooks, so they won't have a chance to do stuff we could do only because our technology was much less sophisticated. Owning a PC is something that's not mandatory anymore in order to do any sort of computing. The newer generations will know very well what a computer does, but will have a much harder time learning _how_ it does it.

finnthehuman 6y ago

This should be obvious to anyone who has kids or works with kids. But they're all functional illiterates too, and mistake kids' greater determination to fight through the unknown as competence. And they're soaking in a culture that makes them make terrible choices with tech. It's so unfashionable to use a laptop instead of a phone that many are steadfast in their desire to do schoolwork by typing on their phones. Suggest that it'd be faster, easier and more comfortable if they just used a computer and you're a grandpa. I was in a classroom where CAD was being taught and some students kept trying to switch to using OnShape on their phones until they were forced to use the computers.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

(2019)

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

There's been discussion on here about this before, some of the more techie types on here wondering why ppl don't know basic stuff about insides of machines, filesystems etc. (I get it/the frustration is real) But this is all part of a general change in computing to mainstream/consumer devices from what it was before and companies like Apple definitely have pushed it far in that direction with closed off OS systems that don't let/want you to see how anything works or change anything like settings, the malleability, and closed wall garden systems that iOS brought us. Android too obviously, but much less so. It's tough it's just the world the youth have grown up in but also in certain pockets there's a light (if you think ppl need to know more) where there's more experimentation and access and exploration in STEM areas etc. More access and information to the niche worlds of creating/tinkering etc than multiple generations before could dream of. Here's to positivity that it continues to bring bright leaders to the fore

deleted 6y ago

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