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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

#261

Post by Izkata »

mwcampbell wrote: post #121
laurieg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely a big factor. When you look at a Japanese computer keyboard [1] you might see lots of Japanese characters on the keys. Almost nobody actually uses these to type. Instead, if you want a か(ka) character then you type k,a on the familiar qwerty keys. These phonetic characters then get converted into the more complex Chinese-origin characters as you go along, allowing you to disambiguate homophones. Th…

> Cast your mind back to when you first encountered a computer keyboard. I remember hunting for seconds to find letters in this unfamiliar arrangement. How early did you learn to type? As an American born in 1980, I learned in first grade, and I don't remember it being a struggle. So maybe it's really important to learn early. FWIW, I'm visually impaired, so looking at the keyboard wasn't a practical option.

I've never learned home-row touch typing, but I have my own style that I learned while playing StarCraft when I was ~10 in the late 90s - you can't spend time hunting for keys if that means your army is getting wiped out.

So while it may have been a struggle for me back then, it was for an entirely different reason. I too don't remember it, though.

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

#262

Post by messe »

crazygringo wrote: post #158
messe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be more awkward than with a mouse+keyboard controlled text editor, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I'd love to get better with working with touchscreens, but I haven't seen any way of getting the composability I've become accustomed to on the *nix command line and associated editors (be it vim, emacs or even the monoliths of atom and vscode).

Of course it's more awkward. But it's also not hard. And if a phone is all you've got, and you don't have the money to spend on a computer on top of it... then you make do. It's not the end of the world. It's fine.

That's a fair point. I know it's the not the end of the world, but I guess I was just hoping to be shown a particularly efficient method of touchscreen input.

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

#263

Post by lstodd »

rococode wrote: post #258
Baeocystin wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

well, I'm sorry, but that seems like too many words for the idea you expressed in them.

maybe it's just me, but at least sometimes brevity pays off.

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

#264

Post by 0xCMP »

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…

This is my calculator of choice on iOS. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tydlig/id721606556?mt=8

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

#265

Post by strken »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #251
makapuf wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think giving up instantly is the same thing as asking for help when you need it, and I don't think e.g. spending 30 seconds minutes googling the definition of "ENOENT" before calling someone else over is blindly persevering. I think there's a path through the middle of the two extremes, where you try a bit of basic problem solving on your own, but ask for help when you're stuck, and learn from the experience.

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

#266

Post by _bxg1 »

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…

This makes a whole lot more sense. I couldn't imagine how a student could get through high school and all its essays without once thinking a physical keyboard might be an easier option.

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

#267

Post by bsder »

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…

> The smartphone is inefficient and restricted computer.

It's worse than this. The smartphone is such a complete abstraction with "apps" that modern teenagers don't even have a correct concept of "computer".

The fact that an "app" is actually a recipe and that something (aka a computer) needs to execute that recipe is a revelation.

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

#268

Post by daniel-alex »

unethical_ban wrote: post #260
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.

Until you have someone double-clicking on browser links (and other things) because that's how you open stuff in a computer, as I've seen multiple less-experienced people doing it.

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

#269

Post by flogic »

0xCMP wrote: post #264
flogic wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is my calculator of choice on iOS. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tydlig/id721606556?mt=8

Sadly, I use an Android and can't say if this is what I would want but it seems on a better path. Most things I've seen for Android are replicating a traditional graphing calculator. Which suffers from 2 major problems. One, graphing calculators already have confusing UIs. Two, the tiny buttons that work tolerably physically are much less tolerable on a touch screen.

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

#270

Post by retsibsi »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #206
andybak wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had similar disagreements with people bemoaning VR for being isolating and non-social compared to other interactive media. Nobody decries reading literature for being somehow morally inferior to watching TV in a group.

>Nobody decries reading literature for being somehow morally inferior to watching TV in a group. // Never heard the term "bookworm", it's a mild pejorative leveled at people who read books a lot.

This probably varies a lot by culture (and sub-culture), but 'bookworm' doesn't really have perjorative connotations for me. I know it was probably originally intended that way, and it can still be used as an insult, but it feels neutral to me.
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