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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

#251

Post by JumpCrisscross »

makapuf wrote: post #202
plaidfuji wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure it really is a good thing that being too good at something is leading to pigeonholing. It's a shame that what was before (or for other discipline) named mastery is now just seen as relegating from higher levels. Can you pigeonhole in medicine? Nuclear physics ? Professional football /sports ? Cooking ? I could go on. I'd frankly rather have people with less high level view and more knowing what it really…

> being too good at something is leading to pigeonholing

People who are good at something tend to ask for help when they need it. Asking for help is a way to get better. Blindly persevering wastes time and tends to force one into dead ends.

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

#252

Post by pnloyd »

cm2187 wrote: post #193
falcor84 wrote: post #147

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 abou…

That being said my mum has been using actual computers for 20 years now (without understanding more than just what she needs), and she double-clicks on everything, even when a single-click should apply. “It works that way”. True.

Wouldnt work for something that toggled on a single click.. e.g checkbox

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

#253

Post by peterburkimsher »

imunolion wrote: post #178
carindistory wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If anybody is interested in a Kanji dataset for improved input methods, please check out the 52,835 characters I gathered.

https://blog.usejournal.com/making-of-a-chinese-characters-d...

I made my own input method for Chinese Hanzi, which decomposes the characters and lets me find characters based on their IDS codes. It also predicts words both forwards and backwards (in case you don't know the first character, but do know the second).

https://pingtype.github.io

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

#254

Post by sundvor »

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…

Interesting. I didn't quite realise it but these may be important computer literacy advantages we can pass on to our children.

Also noting we're typing in English here on a Latin keyboard, however my 7y son's taken to his keyboard like a duck to water. We gave him a touch typing challenge to plant some seeds, and he greatly enjoyed it. I benefit every day from touch typing and want him to have the same advantage - I started far later, in middle school, on the good old typewriters. He's also fully figured out Windows 10 user interface, alt tabbing, using copy paste shortcuts etc; I'm pretty sure he'd figure out any GUI, as long as there was a reward at the end (start a game / movie).

He loves his mouse keyboard gaming, but in order to earn gaming time he's also got to do chores - and I'll also give him points for coding. I'm trying to get him used to Python now, it's a bit early and it can be challenging to find the special characters, but he's getting it rather than giving up - and we'll dive into it more later, with the benefit of the Cozmo SDk to make things more interesting. There's a challenge in making the understanding of code an intrinsic reward, vs the low hanging fruits of playing computer games, but I'm hoping it'll come in the next few years.

I also couldn't help but reflect on the fact that by doing this, he's getting experience with Visual Studio Code, the exact toolset I use for my own work.

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

#255

Post by pnloyd »

griffordson wrote: post #212
ezoe wrote: post #209

This situation is not caused by complicated Japanese input methods. This is caused by young generation who don't use traditional computer with the keyboard. It's another digital divide. Yes. The generation who didn't have a personal computer in their young age is starting to retire. Current 30s-40s years old workers are varies on computer literacy but many had a personal computer when they were a student. I belong to…

What percentage of PC users has ever installed an OS of any kind, ever?

Well there are a ton of gamers who like building there own machines so I imagine it's higher then you'd think. R/pcmasterrace has 1.5 million subscribers, and that's mostly from English speaking populations.

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

#256

Post by danso »

Back in 2011, Dan Russell (search researcher at Google) found that as much as 90% of typical computer users did not know how to use Ctrl-F to find something on a webpage. Since then, I imagine the overall percentage has gotten worse, what with Find in Page being more or less buried:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy...

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

#257

Post by tryptophan »

flogic wrote: post #162
ssivark wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids should be weaned off tablets just like infants are weaned off milk and induced to use their teeth. The thing that really bothers me is, as Alan Kay says: The ipad interface is designed for 2-year-olds and 82-year-olds and being forced upon everyone in between. See, eg: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab... It is a de-evolution of problem-solving culture in the sense that people are disc…

This kinda captures one of my concerns. While I could care less about the particulars of how people interact with computers, I do find it concerning that modern devices seem to make general purpose computing less accessible. I love my phone but I haven't even found a decent calculator for it much less a tolerable equivalent of Excel, the shell, or programming environment. Part of me suspects it's an inherent limitati…

You can emulate a full graphing calculator using wabbitEMU.

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

#258

Post by rococode »

Baeocystin wrote: post #232
7ewis wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started touch typing at around 18, after just forcing myself as I knew it'd be beneficial in the long run. I could type around 60wpm using two fingers, I know where they keys are... Just not how to use every finger! Now I touch type 'properly' I can get close to 100wpm. My speed has kind of plateaued now though unfortunately.

Do you really find a benefit much past ~60wpm? Unless you're just transcribing, I would think compositional speed is the limiting factor.

Not OP but I type ~140 and there are definitely situations where you feel a desire for higher WPM. Informal writing is the most common one - for example, with this comment I'm basically just typing out what I'm thinking and it reads more like a conversation than a well-planned chunk of text. I'm going nearly full-speed because, like most people in the world, I can compose casual sentences in my head much faster than 2 or 3 words a second. This becomes even more noticeable when you're in chats and just typing as you think of things to say. It's also useful to type faster in settings with repetitive phrases, like coding. There is definitely downtime where you think of what to write next, but it's fairly common to quickly think out a longer segment of simple words and have to wait for your typing speed to catch up before moving on.

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

#259

Post by j605 »

btschaegg wrote: post #75

An interesting part in the article: > Lena-Sophie Mueller, of the German nonprofit Initiative D21, pointed out: “Timetables (for railways) are no longer available in paper form. More and more services are based on the Internet [...]” This has been going on for quite a while. I distinctly remember being stranded in Düsseldorf a few years back. I was at the train station, looking for a train (I knew the destination but…

Usually there are kiosks near the ticket machines or you could just ask people at the counter. Ironically I always check the printed/local displays since the online versions have no guarantee.

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

#260

Post by unethical_ban »

falcor84 wrote: post #147

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 abou…

I think it was the idea that single-clicking in the desktop is a select action, while a double click is an "open/navigate" action.

It makes sense to me.

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