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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

#171

Post by scarface74 »

21 wrote: post #148
userbinator wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Commodore 128K came out in 1985 for $300. Certainly not out of reach of the average middle class family.

But you are right, in high school, I was one of the few with a computer and even in college in the early 90s most students didn’t have computers.

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

#172

Post by posting2fast »

matz1 wrote: post #107

The world are always evolving. Nothing sad about this. This is like saying young people can't use abacus anymore. These new generation of young people will grow up and with new kind of input method or paradigim. Who knows maybe the traditional way of programming with keyboard will evolve to something completely different for the next generation of people.

As a CCC speaker said [0], the window of people having seen both, of having seen the basic and simple beginnings, and who even have the option of understanding how it all works together, is very small. The people who get born now just get handed a little glowing brick they swipe around on. They need to be teached what that thing is, so that they [and those that come after them] don't just wander about the planet with these little magical boards, with all power resting with those that program these restricted devices for them.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg7snecRoMs&t=43m35s

You're not more progressive if you slide back from the above, just because the date in the calendar has increased. You're certainly not more progressive if you can't slide back from it because you haven't even realized it yet.

If a majority of people follows a pied piper into a mountain, then a majority of people will be lost. It will not magically transform a trap, a dead end, into "the new way forward". You're just demonstrating how completely oblivious, and how recklessly bold because of it, so many are.

Last but not least, with "evolution" come watershed moments, it's not just smooth sailing from peak to peak -- that's a movie, not evolution.

> If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

-- George Orwell

That is all that matters. You can write well with a touch screen, you can write badly with a keyboard. But to the degree things get reduced to references or icons, thought does end up suffering.

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

#173

Post by scarface74 »

titanix2 wrote: post #169
scarface74 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Besides the Swift playground nothing is really close to real programming. Even worse, it relies on expensive+ external hardware of questionable utility (the "smart" devices) that repetitively shown how insecure they are. And Alexa is a whole problem of its own given the huge privacy thread it is. I will definitely not teach my kids about happily wasting money on GAFAM/PRISM surveillance tools. +I would rather spend 4…

Writing my first program in Applesift Basic wasn’t “real programming” either even in 1986 but it was my gateway that got me interested.

Programming with Swift playgrounds or doing an Automator action that can control smart home devices will hold kids interests way more than “real programming”.

I was excited in 1985 at 12 just to be able print something on the screen. More recently I was asked to give a presentation to some kids during career day. Knowing that they wouldn’t be interested in a talk about doing yet another SAAS app, I recommended that they talk to a friend who does game development.

If they were younger, I would definitely recommend a presentation on automating smart home devices activated by Siri or Alexa.

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

#174

Post by hrktb »

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 this might be the training (or lack of) of your device.

I get it right on mine: https://imgur.com/a/83VCSwo

Bear in mind I use a mac wih the same icloud account, and have years of data on it. Part of it must be shared.

I haven’t use MS’IME in a long time, but I remember it being only marginally better than Apple’s. The main differentiators for me where names (places, stations, peoples).

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

#175

Post by kalleboo »

zenir_ wrote: post #78
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…

Sounds like finally a good usage for the mac touchbar

The touchbar does support this (for Japanese at least) but I still can't get used to looking down from the screen onto the keyboard and still use the standard method

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

#176

Post by plaidfuji »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #154
megaman22 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that that is the case, any longer. I have a lot of trouble with our college-aged interns, because they will barely make an effort to try doing something before getting stonewalled and bailing out to go ask someone to do it for them. Sometimes I just want to yell at them to run the code and see what happens, and then try to figure out why what happened happened. And these are computer science majors.

> doing something before getting stonewalled and bailing out to go ask someone to do it for them Funny this is the problem. One of my major life lessons was learning not to always persevere, and to ask for help as soon as possible. Solves more problems faster, teaches you more ways of looking at a problem and smoothly scales to delegation.

This cannot be emphasized enough. In a social+technical work environment, the more you "persevere" on your own, the more you'll become pigeonholed as a tech guru who solves immediate problems but loses influence in the higher-level decisions of your organization. There's still a balance, though, as asking for too much help will lead to resentment and people just straight up thinking you're stupid.

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

#177

Post by TangoTrotFox »

matz1 wrote: post #107

The world are always evolving. Nothing sad about this. This is like saying young people can't use abacus anymore. These new generation of young people will grow up and with new kind of input method or paradigim. Who knows maybe the traditional way of programming with keyboard will evolve to something completely different for the next generation of people.

I think your statement would be completely appropriate if we were talking about something like a futuristic device like a 'neural lace' that enabled you to input using your brain at an extremely high rate and with minimal to no effort. Calculators and abacuses do the exact same thing, but calculators enable it to be done vastly more quickly and easily.

In this case touch screens are simply vastly inferior for the vast majority of all tasks. At best, they're something different. At worst, they're a textbook example of artificial demand [1] for a mediocre technology driven by highly effective marketing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_demand

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

#178

Post by imunolion »

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…

There are some better input methods for Japanese, and they are not available on smartphones.

SKK

What you are talking above is phrase-wise conversion. However, using SKK can easily distinguish "感じ" and "漢字" by "KanJi" and "Kanji", by explicitly specifying where the conversion starts and ends with Shift key. SKK can massively reduce the conversion candidates, so that people can faster obtain converted sentences.SKK is a good input method, but doesn't exist for smartphones.

T-Code (or TUT-Code)

We also have t-code input methods on computers but not on smartphones. It assigns 2 key strokes into one letter(kana or frequently used kanji) directly. For example, "kd" will type "の" and "is" will be "東". This input method is also very efficient and boost input speed, however it is designed for physical full size keyboard with 8 fingers. Its users can't do the same with software keyboard because they remember the key strokes with fingers.

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

#179

Post by tobyhinloopen »

lfowles wrote: post #25
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…

> 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. I don't know, I have the urge to tap words in books to bring up definitions after using ereaders for the past ten years.

My urge: Let me CMD+F this -oh right, it's a physical book
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