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Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

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Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#161

Post by donkeyd »

asdff wrote: post #134
pagutierrezn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone born in the last 25 years will intuitively think to search for a video tutorial for any new micro-skill. Etc. But many kids have difficulties adquiring a new skill that requires reading because videos are not enough

Stack overflow questions should be flagged for deletion if the answer is in paragraph 1 of the man page

Or the answer could be exactly that the answer is in paragraph 1 of the man page. In stead refusing the man a fish, teach the man how to fish.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#162

Post by hatsuseno »

ryukafalz wrote: post #120
theLotusGambit wrote: post #16

> Why do the teens of today think this? Because simply, they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. Wanting technology to just work without having to deal with esoteric nonsense? How childish!

That “esoteric nonsense” is how all this stuff actually works, and if you don’t have a grasp on the basics, it’s hard to tell when you’re being taken advantage of. (And these days, it feels like everyone’s looking to take advantage of unsuspecting users.)

When I have a problem with my car, I take it to a dealer or a certified repairshop. I effectively know jack-all about the workings of that machine. I can be easily conned into paying for repairs that don't need doing. Do you wish to claim that no such context exists for you?

It's easy to gloss over the fact that for >99% of users the machine "just needs to work", and I don't think that's unreasonable. There will be a subset of kids that /do/ take an interest in this stuff, and will pick it up as the next generation of "IT magicians".

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#163

Post by hyperman1 »

pasabagi wrote: post #150
watwut wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General experimentation does break tech quite often for adults. If they mess with settings, they are unable to later fix them. For example, they end up without internet working and have absolutely no way to figure out that proxy was set to something random. Or even something as simple as having all the fonts too small/too big and being unable to fix them back. Accidentally hiding toolbar you need. There are many ways…

I think it used to be easier to break things, in any case. When I was a child, I used to delete things to make space for games. I quickly discovered the 'Windows' folder was taking a lot of space. I don't honestly remember if that was the move that really bricked the computer, but the computer was certainly bricked by the time I was done with it.

I knew someonewho zipped the windows folder for the same reason. If he wanted anything in it, he could just start winzip . Didnt't go as planned.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#164

Post by bambataa »

guggle wrote: post #138

Hello, I think the article is not very good, however its main point still stands. Part of my activity is teaching basic word processing and basic html/css to non-IT students. And it's quite a struggle because most (I say most because of course there are exceptions) students don't know how to use their computer for the most basic tasks. Most have no idea how files are organized on a computer, ignoring the concept of f…

That's because the aim of computer design in the few decades has been to turn such things into implementation details. If your primary computing device is a phone or a tablet you have no idea, and /no need to know/, what your photo's filename is. It's just there in the app and can be easily shared, edited or printed from there.

The question is -- is that a bad thing? For the majority of people a computer is a means to end and the fewer implementation details exposed the better. Just as I don't really want or need to know how a car works in detail in order to get from A to B.

What I see happening is that computing knowledge becomes more and more the preserve of specialists and that's a good thing. When I started to learn programming I read about why the command line was so useful and people were saying things like "you can batch rename files really easily!". But the only times I've ever really had to do that are programming-related tasks such as log files etc. Most people simply don't need to do that often enough to justify learning how.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#165

Post by michaelt »

BubRoss wrote: post #112
tapland wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing where the author is coming from. People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of home computers, WWW and smartphones there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. That didn't happen. It's still people inte…

> there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. Over the course of the last 25 years, I've never heard that expectation anywhere. There was always a mentality that computers would keep getting easier to use, which is completely true. There was always the idea that kids would integ…

I was born in the mid 80s; in my youth many families didn't have a home computer, and computer education in schools was... less developed than it is now. So if you met a kid who was good with computers in 1996, in all probability they sat down at their family computer and figured things out for themselves.

There were certainly people who noticed this correlation and predicted, if every family had a home computer, almost every kid would do the same.

With hindsight, nobody was noticing the kids who had grown up with home computers but hadn't figured lots of things out on their own, or controlling for things correlated with having a home computer.

You can see a similar theme these days - like the theory [1] that TikTok and Snapchat are easier for young people to use, perhaps intentionally.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#166

Post by oblio »

donkeyd wrote: post #160
derefr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, a lot of things that seemed hard really did just turn out to be unfamiliar. Word processing, for example: if you expect a five-year-old to learn it as a matter of course on the way to do other things, they can and will. There's probably a bunch of things like that. Little things. Kids know how to set reminders/create calendar events. Teens can intuit the usage of ACLs in multi-channel group chats l…

> Nobody has to tell kids to google the text of an installation error for the game they were trying to install. I'm not sure what kids you're referring to, but when I look at my 14 yo sister and her friends, nearly all they know how to do is start Snapchat. If they'd get a cryptical error they'd call a family member to fix it for them. I feel like millenials have broader knowledge of computers than the newer generati…

> When I was young, stuff didn't just work. I could tell by the sound of my dial up modem whether it would successfully connect. I could modify the registry to fix problems, I could put more RAM in my PC if it became too slow and it would take hours to reinstall Windows.

And that's why people flat out didn't use them. You had tinkerers and non-users (which were the vast majority, as people conveniently forget :-) ).

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#167

Post by austincheney »

rc-5 wrote: post #32

Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen, and absolutely do not represent the majority of teenagers. This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. >>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you. In my experience, although there may be some teena…

> This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life.

The generalization expressed in the long rant completely describes my teenagers. They can tap a screen like an elite ninja warrior but have no idea what to do with a physical keyboard. When the touch screen goes away they are hopelessly lost.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#168

Post by mywacaday »

I don't know why there was ever an expectation that teens would know more. People that are interested in a topic know more, its not a factor of age. The same could be said of cars, boats, household appliances, anything! If you are interested you will learn and if your not you won't. Exposure and use on a daily basis does not imply that you will know whats going on under the hood, a literal old car metaphor for understanding whats going on out of sight. The majority of people drive or are driven in cars and only have a cursory knowledge of how they work and the thing is they don't need to and that's how it should be. We don't expect people to understand in detail how their cars/trains/elevators/coffee machine/hair dryer work, why should a computer be different?

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#169

Post by im3w1l »

watwut wrote: post #133
danaris wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. > Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better…

General experimentation does break tech quite often for adults. If they mess with settings, they are unable to later fix them. For example, they end up without internet working and have absolutely no way to figure out that proxy was set to something random. Or even something as simple as having all the fonts too small/too big and being unable to fix them back. Accidentally hiding toolbar you need. There are many ways…

It breaks often for kids too. But we see this as natural. "Of course he broke it. He's just a stupid kid." But we expect adults to be responsible and not break things.

To learn you need to be able to break things.

As a sidenote, we see that opposite for social skills. Tolerance for mistakes has gone way down, it's not safe for today's kids to experiment and fail so they don't learn them as well.

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