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But could anyone seriously claim that children are leaving school and not able to use computers? I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with

by omh 15y ago

But could anyone seriously claim that children are leaving school and not able to use computers? I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail and office applications than students of 5 or 10 years ago. Even if they aren't using them regularly, they're at least familiar with most IT concepts.

Silhouette 15y ago
> I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail ... than students of 5 or 10 years ago. I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Newer, more efficient methods of communication have developed, and e-mail in an anachronism to most young people in the era of texting, Facebook messaging, and tweets. Whether swapping a powerful, flexible infrastructure for viewing the world in 140 characters or fewer is progress in a healthy direction is a different question. Then again, we haven't managed to get secure e-mail standardised, solve the spam problem, or reliably prevent malware transmission over e-mail, despite having several decades to work on these problems. I don't think we in the older generations are in much of a position to lecture anyone on how to communicate effectively. I'm hoping that if this is a genuine effort to teach some computing real skills to younger people, part of it will include some exposure to these sorts of issues so perhaps they can do a better job of it than we have.
- estel 15y ago
  I suspect that you're wrong. My experience seems to be that pupils of secondary age and onwards are well accustomed to using multiple media for various usecases. For talking to friends or family? Facebook or text. That work assignment that their teacher is distributing to everyone? They'll probably send an email.
- gmac 15y ago
  I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Yes -- I was surprised (and somewhat weirded out) recently to discover that my younger sister, who's in her early twenties, thinks of email exclusively as a formal communications channel, and never emails her friends (she texts or Facebook-messages them instead).
  - omh 15y ago
    I'd never heard it in quite those terms before, but that echoes the way that my generation might consider e-mail to be for talking to friends and physical letters to be "formal".
ig1 15y ago
You need to be very careful about things like this, you're making big assumptions that could have huge consequences. What do you think the computer literacy rate is for children who don't have computers at home ? - it's easy to assume that computers are ubiquitous and everyone uses them all the time but it's far from true. The children most likely to be computer illiterate are also the ones from the most financially and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. If you cut them off from getting an IT education at school what do you think that does to their employment and social mobility prospects ? You can't just design educational systems aimed at the "average" student, you need to cater to every student.

by omh 15y ago

Silhouette 15y ago

> I'd guess that the average teenager would be more capable with e-mail ... than students of 5 or 10 years ago. I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Newer, more efficient methods of communication have developed, and e-mail in an anachronism to most young people in the era of texting, Facebook messaging, and tweets. Whether swapping a powerful, flexible infrastructure for viewing the world in 140 characters or fewer is progress in a healthy direction is a different question. Then again, we haven't managed to get secure e-mail standardised, solve the spam problem, or reliably prevent malware transmission over e-mail, despite having several decades to work on these problems. I don't think we in the older generations are in much of a position to lecture anyone on how to communicate effectively. I'm hoping that if this is a genuine effort to teach some computing real skills to younger people, part of it will include some exposure to these sorts of issues so perhaps they can do a better job of it than we have.

estel 15y ago
I suspect that you're wrong. My experience seems to be that pupils of secondary age and onwards are well accustomed to using multiple media for various usecases. For talking to friends or family? Facebook or text. That work assignment that their teacher is distributing to everyone? They'll probably send an email.
gmac 15y ago
I suspect the average teenager today hardly uses e-mail at all. Yes -- I was surprised (and somewhat weirded out) recently to discover that my younger sister, who's in her early twenties, thinks of email exclusively as a formal communications channel, and never emails her friends (she texts or Facebook-messages them instead).
- omh 15y ago
  I'd never heard it in quite those terms before, but that echoes the way that my generation might consider e-mail to be for talking to friends and physical letters to be "formal".

ig1 15y ago

You need to be very careful about things like this, you're making big assumptions that could have huge consequences. What do you think the computer literacy rate is for children who don't have computers at home ? - it's easy to assume that computers are ubiquitous and everyone uses them all the time but it's far from true. The children most likely to be computer illiterate are also the ones from the most financially and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. If you cut them off from getting an IT education at school what do you think that does to their employment and social mobility prospects ? You can't just design educational systems aimed at the "average" student, you need to cater to every student.