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A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

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Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#141

Post by vimy »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #116
ssivark wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, one can technically vomit out a few hundred words using a small touch screen. But the tools make it damn difficult to edit and re-organize text. Does this mean that all such reports are basically stream-of-consciousness writing instead of a more carefully polished piece of work?

The more I use my iPhone X, the better I am at it. I actually prefer its keyboard to the iPad’s for prose now, because you can long press the period and select text much more easily. If you can do that with the iPad, I’ve not found it yet.

iPad doesn't have 3D Touch yet but you can press the keyboard with two fingers instead.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#142

Post by carindistory »

jdietrich wrote: post #45

It's worth bearing in mind that the source is Japanese. All input methods for the Japanese language are a compromise. Inputting kanji on a physical keyboard is nowhere near as fluid as inputting Latin characters - you're constantly toggling between inputting kana and selecting the kanji options presented by the IME. The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and…

As a Japanese native speaker who has to enter many Japanese texts on a daily basis both on a PC and on a smartphone, I feel obliged to point out that the quality of an IME (a piece of software providing possible kanji/alphabet sequences for a given phonetic relization), is far better on a PC (its built-in MS-IME, to be precise) than on a smartphone (iOS).

I started looking for some example to show how bad iOS's IME is, and I found it for the first try: it returns a wrong candidate for the first suggestion for "かんじをにゅうりょくする" (to enter kanji), returning "感じを入力する" (to enter sense) rather than the correct "漢字を入力する". Note that "漢字" (kanji) and "感じ" (sense) have the exact same phonetic relization: Both of them are pronounced as kanji. It seems as if iOS's IME does not take into account any contexts at all. If it did, how could it have calculated entering sense (?) is more likely than entering kanji? This kind of absurd error would rarely happen with Microsoft's IME and it always stresses me out when entering long texts in Japanese on a smartphone.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#143

Post by 21 »

userbinator wrote: post #133
21 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen children accustomed to using touch interfaces blurring the line between physical and virtual, i.e swiping at physical objects like books, photos, even walls. I've not seen this behavior with those used to non touch interfaces. Why do you think this is a bad think? This is how kids learn how the world works, by trying the same thing in different contexts, like how small children put everything in their mou…

I don't think that making information access easier is ever a bad think. Except when it decreases learning and perseverance, and deemphasises the benefit of careful thinking. The term 'spoonfeeding' is very relevant here.

The way you view personal responsibility is also important here.

Spoonfeeding kinds of assumes no human agency.

If you let yourself be a leaf in the wind, yes, you'll arrive wherever the currents take you.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#144

Post by userbinator »

scarface74 wrote: post #130
titanix2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but having the technical possibility to create something on the machine make this minority exists in the first place. Now take the same demographic with a locked down class of devices and the basic programming crowd fall to 0%.

With iOS 12, Apple will be integrating automation that lets you automate actions within other programs either visually or from what I’ve read JavaScript. Just imagine what kids can do when they can use their phone to automate smart home devices. There are also apps that let you program robots. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HK962VC/A/ubtech-jimu-rob... Amazon announced an easy way to program Alexa. https://develo…

IMHO all very poor substitutes.

Yes, I know Apple wants to police their App Store, but writing something for your own personal use (and maybe to give some copies to friends) shouldn't be a huge bureaucratic hurdle.

(Android has smaller hurdles but still not insignificant --- when the first step in the tutorial is "download and install this gigabyte-sized piece of software", you can be sure a ton of potential users have already been put-off. Compare with early home computers that booted to a BASIC prompt, or PCs where DEBUG was there and ready to create tiny/small "apps" immediately.)

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#145

Post by ThinkingGuy »

ximeng wrote: post #34
nickserv wrote: post #9

Do your children a favor and get them a "real" computer with keyboard and mouse, instead of a tablet. I've found it helps with several things. For one, I've seen children accustomed to using touch interfaces blurring the line between physical and virtual, i.e swiping at physical objects like books, photos, even walls. I've not seen this behavior with those used to non touch interfaces. Also, learning to use a keyboar…

I've absentmindedly pinched to zoom on books and occasionally mentally ctrl+z when I screw up. Not a major problem.

I've never done that, but I sometimes will pick up a paper book, and instinctively want to press control-F in order to search for a particular word or phrase.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#147

Post by falcor84 »

The first example provided in the article (indeed the first sentence) is “How do I double click?”, and I want to focus on this.

As a kid in the 90s, I just took double clicking as a necessary evil. But after many many opportunities of trying (mostly successfully) to teach it to both the elderly and to kids, I've gradually grown to hate it. It's such a horrible gesture, difficult to perform, complicated to reason about and entirely disconnected from any real-world metaphor.

May double clicking die off and vanish, never to be found again, except for in the annals of bad ideas.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#148

Post by 21 »

userbinator wrote: post #138
scarface74 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCs were designed to be devices for people to create things. I think you have an idealized view of how most people use PCs. Even during the first era of PCs in the 80s, most kids used them for playing games. By the mid 90s, it was all about games and “multimedia” on CDs. Then Facebook and social media games. The geeks that looked forward to InCider, Nybble, and whatever the offshoot computer mag from 3-2-1 Contact we…

The geeks that looked forward to InCider, Nybble, and whatever the offshoot computer mag from 3-2-1 Contact were and typed BASIC programs in were the minority. But if you look at the PC magazines from the late 80s/early 90s, magazines not even oriented at "developers" but more "power users", you'll find huge chunks of content devoted to programming --- not just BASIC, but Asm (DOS's DEBUG command was the preferred me…

> But if you look at the PC magazines from the late 80s/early 90s

What was the reach of those magazines? When I was young I was the only one in my high school class with a computer. There was some self-selection going on.

Today, with $300 (inflated dollars, so much cheaper than in the past) you can get a very nice laptop and program your heart away if you so want.

Those people who would have read those magazines are now on various internet programming/forums, hacking minecraft. It's only the magazines which disappeared because now there are better ways to disseminate technical info. The absolute numbers of hackers probably remained similar, it's just that now there are a ton more computer users, so they get diluted.

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#149

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

carindistory wrote: post #142
jdietrich wrote: post #45

It's worth bearing in mind that the source is Japanese. All input methods for the Japanese language are a compromise. Inputting kanji on a physical keyboard is nowhere near as fluid as inputting Latin characters - you're constantly toggling between inputting kana and selecting the kanji options presented by the IME. The prediction and correction technologies of smartphone keyboards are a very good match for kanji and…

As a Japanese native speaker who has to enter many Japanese texts on a daily basis both on a PC and on a smartphone, I feel obliged to point out that the quality of an IME (a piece of software providing possible kanji/alphabet sequences for a given phonetic relization), is far better on a PC (its built-in MS-IME, to be precise) than on a smartphone (iOS). I started looking for some example to show how bad iOS's IME i…

I think iOS's IME expects you to segment things yourself, rather than typing several words strung together and then pressing the suggest button?

Re: A new digital divide: Young people who can’t use keyboards

#150

Post by zcdziura »

Havoc wrote: post #146

People write reports on smartphones? Everyone around me can def use a keyboard. Not ten finger touch type but near enough

This article talks primarily about people from Japan, whose script I imagine is much easier and faster to enter via a smartphone.
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