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The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

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Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#31

Post by joefourier »

xbmcuser wrote: post #21

The same kids will run rings around most parents no matter how tech savvy when it cames to using social media. I know way more about computers and technology than my parents at the same time my dad knows more about wiring and plumbing where I sometimes draw a blank though YouTube helps. As my dad had to interact with bad plumbing and wiring in his life I haven't.

What exactly requires tech savviness about social media? The interfaces are designed to be simple and intuitively usable by the lowest common denominator. The platforms' front-ends expose almost nothing about they actually work, and there is almost no way for an average user to fix any problems should they occur, or to customize the closed-source app released in the walled garden. Does Instagram teach you about image codecs? Does the average user have any idea how the computer vision in Snapchat filters works? When YouTube suffers an outage, what can they do but shrug and wait until the people working there fix it?

That's exactly what the article above is saying. The kids aren't learning any problem solving skills. They may be better at following social media trends, knowing the latest memes, and finding the latest hot new app, but that has nothing to do with technical aptitude.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#32

Post by ghaff »

joefourier wrote: post #31
xbmcuser wrote: post #21

The same kids will run rings around most parents no matter how tech savvy when it cames to using social media. I know way more about computers and technology than my parents at the same time my dad knows more about wiring and plumbing where I sometimes draw a blank though YouTube helps. As my dad had to interact with bad plumbing and wiring in his life I haven't.

What exactly requires tech savviness about social media? The interfaces are designed to be simple and intuitively usable by the lowest common denominator. The platforms' front-ends expose almost nothing about they actually work, and there is almost no way for an average user to fix any problems should they occur, or to customize the closed-source app released in the walled garden. Does Instagram teach you about image…

It's more akin to the fact that I'm woefully unaware of most new pop music coming out these days as well as many TV shows/films/video channels that cater to a younger audience. Given that I'm at least reasonably connected on social media I'm probably not as completely in the dark as some my age, but I'm certainly not pop culture savvy.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#33

Post by fmajid »

It has nothing to do with generation. About 5% of the population has the neurological wiring that makes a good programmer. The rest are just passive users of technology, just as clueless politicians and educators seem to think teaching Excel (a useful skill) somehow constitutes Computer Science.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#34

Post by fmajid »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #30
high_derivative wrote: post #17

I have long thought the term 'digital native' is a sort of filter for people who are not actually technologists but avid consumers of mostly social platforms. I (as a computer scientist) have never heard people actually working in tech refer to themselves as that.

I always assumed it was coined by a manager somewhere who was impressed by his teenage intern's ability to set up his email. There are a lot of people who aren't just not technical but actively phobic of computers, I think 'digital native' is more like knowing how to drive than knowing how to fix a car.

AFAIK it was introduced by Don Tapscot in his 1999 book Growing up Digital.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#35

Post by auxym »

fmajid wrote: post #33

It has nothing to do with generation. About 5% of the population has the neurological wiring that makes a good programmer. The rest are just passive users of technology, just as clueless politicians and educators seem to think teaching Excel (a useful skill) somehow constitutes Computer Science.

Do you have a source for that 5% figure?

I mean, I suspect as much from my own experience, but I'm curious to know if there's actual research out there.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#36

Post by analog31 »

In my house, Mom and Dad are scientists, and quite tech savvy in our respective fields, including digital technology supporting our work. I also happen to have taken up programming and electronics as hobbies starting around 1981.

So I'm a tech savvy parent. Yet I've noticed some age differences. My kids are "quicker" at picking things up. They can notice a tiny detail on a big screen, and are more likely to recognize and remember the meaning of an icon, whereas I have to hover over it with my mouse pointer and hope for a tool tip to pop up.

So things like GUIs will seem more intuitive to them, when the real advantage is their ability to quickly distinguish a bunch of tiny abstract symbols.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#37

Post by noir_lord »

ddebernardy wrote: post #8

It's not clear to me why they should be "digitally superior" - whatever that means. Kids just need to tap icons on their touchscreens nowadays. They seldom need to tinker with or troubleshoot computers. Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes nee…

I'm seeing this right now, I grew up programming (started at 7), at 9 I was way more computer fluent than my 9 year old step-son is now.

I think it's simply that modern machines are (generally) so reliable that you never have to get under the hood to figure out what broke until you (rarely) do and then you have no conceptual framework for trying to resolve what is broken.

His trouble shooting process is handing it to me and telling me "it's not working".

I refuse to fix it unless he watches and pays attention to how I'm fixing it, slowly he's starting to understand that none of this stuff is magic.

I don't care if has no interest in computers generally but I think it's important that he realises the devices/technology he interacts with isn't just a magic black box.

He was interested in what I was programming the other day though so I told him we could build a website together as long as he chose the subject, wrote what he wanted to put on it and wrote the code with my supervision, inevitably it's going to be about Fortnite but I'll take whatever wins I can get.

Generally I'll ask answer his questions with questions, we had a discussion about IP addresses the other day (though he had know idea what an IP address was) because he was curious how one computer "talks" to another so I asked a bunch of questions "Assuming you had lots of computers how would you tell one from the other" "I'd number them" "Ok, so what if you wanted to replace a computer but keep talking to it as if it was the old computer?" "I'd make it so the numbers could be changed for each computer", "OK, so you have millions of computers with millions of numbers how would you know which number went with which computer?" "well...I'd name them but in a way that I could say this name belongs to this number", I was proud, he pretty much figured out DNS without knowing DNS was a thing.

So then I showed him the config panel for a web host and pointed out that his names and numbers where an actual thing.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#38

Post by wilsonnb3 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #15
traderjane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way were people able to introspect into their computing devices for learning? By being able to poke around OS details or the filesystem? Doesn't it sound more important to have an IDE + fluid building so people don't have to care about the details?

There's no such thing as "don't have to care about the details." This is the biggest difference between then and now. In the 70s and 80s computing was all about details, all the way down to the hardware, which most developers understood at the register level. 8-bit amateurs grew up with simple toy machines. They learned enough detail to allow a natural transition to professional development on mainframes and minis -…

> There's no such thing as "don't have to care about the details."

The whole point of the many abstractions between the user and the hardware is so they don’t have to care about the details.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#39

Post by ddebernardy »

Yetanfou wrote: post #26
ddebernardy wrote: post #8

It's not clear to me why they should be "digitally superior" - whatever that means. Kids just need to tap icons on their touchscreens nowadays. They seldom need to tinker with or troubleshoot computers. Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes nee…

I'd put the top more or less at the rise of Linux, the BSD's and similar systems. While fiddling with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT might have given people the impression that they were 'programming' their PC's in reality all they did was find the right incantations to get their games to work. Porting one of the free OS's to new hardware is at a different level from shoving some drivers in high memory to make room for…

> I'd put the top more or less at the rise of Linux, the BSD's and similar systems.

I'm not sure the two compare so well. Kids that fiddle with Linux do so out of curiosity. For the other kids, the closest you'll ever get to config file fiddling might be when they're forced to use Linux -- which could happen, for instance, when their techie parent refuses to have a Windows box or a Mac in the house.

By contrast, take any household with a Windows box and a few kids. The latter will want to play games on the former sooner or later.

Re: The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent

#40

Post by pm90 »

noir_lord wrote: post #37
ddebernardy wrote: post #8

It's not clear to me why they should be "digitally superior" - whatever that means. Kids just need to tap icons on their touchscreens nowadays. They seldom need to tinker with or troubleshoot computers. Just spitballing here, but I'd expect peak tech-savviness to have occurred in the 80s and early 90s. If you were old enough to want to play resource intensive games released in the run-up to Win95, you'd sometimes nee…

I'm seeing this right now, I grew up programming (started at 7), at 9 I was way more computer fluent than my 9 year old step-son is now. I think it's simply that modern machines are (generally) so reliable that you never have to get under the hood to figure out what broke until you (rarely) do and then you have no conceptual framework for trying to resolve what is broken. His trouble shooting process is handing it to…

You're an amazing parent.
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