Kids might be digital natives – but a study shows they aren’t computer literate
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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.)
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.
I don’t think you missed anything.
Setting up IRQ settings, jumper for IRQ settings, replacing/installing PCI/ISA/AGP cards...
Man. It's amazing, just, how much separation there is by a generation.
I've seen this generation start to reach college and lack familiarity with the basics of file management and general basic productivity on a computer.
The decline in general inquisitiveness is also a challenge - computing devices are now sealed and gasketed, single purpose, and most people have never looked inside one, let alone wanted to understand how they work. There's a part of growing up with technology where you should (in my view) start to wonder things like how if computers run programs, who made the first program? And how did they write it? And what tools did they use to write it if they had no other programs?
It's very challenging to enthuse someone who hasn't thought about this into wanting to learn to program and think like a power user - the locked down computers they've known as they grew up were content consumption platforms, not creation. Apps are made by "other people" in some unknown process - the thought they could do it generally doesn't cross their mind.
It's frustrating that we spent decades developing fantastic tools to help ourselves with all sorts of intellectual work, and have more or less abandoned teaching people to use them well.
As the tower of abstraction has gotten taller, there's a temptation to teach near the shiny end; ML for high school! But that leaves students with huge gaps in their understanding of how things work under the hood, which impairs their ability to connect what they learn and build on it.
The most advanced thing I learned in my sixth form was designing an e-commerce website - not coding it, just using MS Paint and Word to make a first mockup. This was sixth form, the level just below going to university and I was being taught Microsoft fucking Paint.
1000x this - even on Mac, the rise in the "recents" view seems to be intended to avoid the user needing to know where their files are stored. This means users can't find them to back them up, as they don't understand the file has a path and location, belonging to a structural hierarchy. It's a document, so my junior thesis should be backed up if I back up "documents", right? (Not if it's stored in Downloads.....)
> We now have the "talk" with our juniors about backups, as more than one has lost their entire junior thesis because it was stored on their laptop and nowhere else.
Still see this problem with honours year degree students - must happen at least a couple of times per year, even with access to more on-prem and cloud storage than they can shake a stick at! Tolerance for this kind of situation is now so limited that it's likely a student in that situation may end up failing.
> As the tower of abstraction has gotten taller, there's a temptation to teach near the shiny end
The sheer height of the tower is now such that chunks of it seem to be forgotten about, and crumbling away. And the foundations are near collapse - it's incredibly exhausting trying to explain concepts to someone that has no basic understanding of the operation of a computer, yet is trying to be learn new things.
I've seen boot camps trying to teach people git, where the instructors themselves don't properly understand how the command line works, and wouldn't be able to explain that the files a student "sees" in Finder are the same files as in the Terminal...
If people need folders and file names, they're there. People will rediscover them and reinvent all the techniques we did. But they're also inventing new techniques that fit their workflows. Workflows that are more efficient because they're built around their toolkit, not our toolkit.
Like the toolkit of just doing everything online. I've got Google backing up almost everything I do, faster, cheaper, and better than I can. And available anywhere. Not only is it there if I lose my laptop, it's there if I left it at home and want to use my phone, or somebody else's computer.
Different times call for different mechanisms. They'll take time to shake out, see what survives and what doesn't. But things they don't learn aren't necessarily signs of weakness. They may be signs of new strengths.
Granted, I would be in the tail end of this theoretical golden age, but I worked in college IT to pay for undergrad in the early-mid 10s at a mid-tier large public university and my job entailed helping out people around my age cohort and adults. We did file backups a lot.
I can safely say that probably 99% of people did not have subfolders and pretty much exclusively used Documents, Downloads and Desktop. Maybe Pictures. Usually with names like paper, paper-1, paper-draft, paper-draft-1, paper-draft-final. I have literally seen desktops filled with icons multiple times over, never organized or cleaned. Almost none of these people have probably seen a command line, and certainly not outside a context where they are following a step by step guide.
If it works for you it isn‘t stupid, but people on HN seem to like to project a very rosy picture of technical literacy in the golden days when very few people probably got to that level.
The laptop wi-fis to the internet! Sure, I guess... The phone wi-fis to the internet! Um, yeah... The phone wi-fis to the tower to get internet! Wait, what? The phone wi-fis to the tower to make calls! No! The phone wi-fis to my headphones! Ok, warmer, but that's Bluetooth. ThE tElEvIsIoN rEmOtE wI-fIs To ThE tElEvIsIoN!!!1 NO IT DOES NOT!!
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.
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.
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.
Do your job of being our product and make as little fuss as possible.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Knowledge of one app/cloud/system convey no useful expectations or knowledge of another system. All systems are remote, far off, unexploreable, unlearnable.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Furthermore, as the description of the assessment mentions, "The reasoning strategies that underlie computational thinking can help make sense of complex ideas and solve problems."[0]
Learning about computers isn't just learning an extremely flexible tool; it's learning how to think in a rigorous, abstract manner. It's not the only way to learn critical thinking skills, but it's not possible to learn about computers without them.
> Students were asked to demonstrate through simulated computer-based real-world scenarios the knowledge, judgment, and skills needed to access, process, and communicate information with technology.
I don't think this is about knowing how computer works, but rather about the knowledge and skills needed to work with the information provided by the internet. It is fine without knowing how computer works, but growing up in a generation with a lot more information/disinformation without knowing how to handle them is worrying to me. Also, I wonder if it would be better called 'information literacy' than 'computer literacy' here...
The computer illiterate are lamentable but a natural product of making them easier to use. People who are still interested will find many more resources and free ones to boot on today's internet than early adopters could have dreamed of.
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.
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