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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

#351

Post by flyingfences »

ssivark wrote: post #61
crazygringo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who recently worked in education... yes. Anecdotally, I tended to see it at the community-college level with students who owned a large-screen phone and didn't own a computer. I don't think anyone is writing whole research papers or serious lab reports on phones. A two-page reading response is totally doable. Something with footnotes or equations, not so much.

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?

> damn difficult to edit and re-organize text

The honest and unfortunate answer is, in my personal experience, that editing and re-organizing text doesn't often happen in students' papers regardless of the tools available to them. Not knowing how to type well is one thing, but a _lot_ of students get to college not knowing how to write a half-decent paper (and then still don't learn squat in their freshman composition class).

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

#352

Post by natch »

emodendroket wrote: post #312
natch wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the question was what do they have that comes closest. They do have a lot more than just pinyin and handwriting. If you don't know, it's fine to just say that, or stay away from the discussion, especially when you seem to be answering with such certainty on something where you didn't read the question.

They have nothing that resembles the tenkey input because they have nothing that resembles kana, unless you want to count bopomofo. If you want to make some correction, rather than just condescending to me, feel free.

Sorry I just find statements of the form “nothing exists” a bit irksome especially when the person talking doesn’t know what exists as can be seen by looking at the matter at hand. Chinese has plenty of ten key input systems, some alive, some dead, since the mid 1990s at least for phones and possibly before that for the keypads accompanying computers. It’s been a very fertile space for innovation and I’d be extremely surprised to meet anyone who has kept up with it, so forgive me for being skeptical of your claim of perfect knowledge of a negative. I was asking a different person who sounded like he knew something, and you answered. I did mention zhuyin which is commonly understood informal shorthand for zhuyinfuhao, the more formal word for bopomofo. There are component based systems as well that work with radicals, strokes, quadrants of the characters, and all kinds of zany stuff. That being said, I am not very familiar with Japanese and didn’t know about the the flick method.

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

#353

Post by ldjb »

Izkata wrote: post #279
ldjb wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often encounter people having issues double-clicking. Actually, a lot of people have trouble just single-clicking, so double-clicking is even more of a challenge. A lot of people just can't get the knack for clicking twice in quick succession. And the inconsistency between when they should single-click and when they should double-click causes a lot of confusion. I think it probably would make life easier to get rid…

> And the inconsistency between when they should single-click and when they should double-click causes a lot of confusion. There's a lot of anecdotes about how uneasy/annoyed/bothered it can make you feel when watching someone unfamiliar with a scroll wheel instead mouse over and slowly click+drag the scrollbar, but the big one for me is seeing someone double-click on a hyperlink...

In my experience, dragging the scrollbar slowly hasn't been an issue I've seen. What I have seen people do is drag the scrollbar really quickly and end up at the bottom of the page, when what they want is in the middle. They correct this by dragging the scrollbar sharply up, but they're now back at the top of the page. Rince, repeat.

I also see people use the arrow buttons on the scrollbar. But they just click the button repeatedly instead of holding it down. Which means that for a very long page, it can take them a long time and hundreds of clicks to get to the section of the page they want to see.

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

#354

Post by LyndsySimon »

dorchadas wrote: post #113
LyndsySimon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use fountain pens exclusively and take pride in my penmanship. I also love my Apple Pencil - it lets me use and practice my skills, and is a very good approximation of several different types of nibs. Even my older Wacom tablets weren’t as good.

Any tips on improving penmanship? Mine has always been absolutely horrible, which stinks as there's lots of things I prefer to write out by hand. Most things, in fact, unless it needs to be electronic.

I started by changing my writing drastically - I wrote in smallcaps for a while, until I “forgot” my handwriting, then started over.

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

#355

Post by geomark »

sundvor wrote: post #330
geomark wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point me to that touch typing challenge that your 7 year old enjoyed? Very pertinent to my interests. Also, Python at age 7 seems pretty advanced. My 7 year old is pretty strong with block-based programming but I'm still trying to figure out when and how to transition to real coding.

Nice! It was actually an iPad app that we used, with the Bluetooth keyboard - he was using it for hours. I'll dig up the app name when I can find the iPad, presently everyone's asleep and the iPad was hidden somewhere. I think it doesn't matter so much which one you choose though, as long as it tells you what fingers you are allowed to use for what keys. The challenge that we set for him was to perform the exercises…

Thanks!

I started my kid with Scratch. Then had him do some of the Hour of Code challenges on Code.org and then some of their courses (recommended). Did a couple Arduino projects programmed with ArduBlock. Now we are working with a VEXIQ kit from Vex Robotics and working our way through the RobotC course. All graphical programming so far. Want to start looking under the hood at the actual code soon.

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

#356

Post by [deleted] »

geomark wrote: post #355
sundvor wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! It was actually an iPad app that we used, with the Bluetooth keyboard - he was using it for hours. I'll dig up the app name when I can find the iPad, presently everyone's asleep and the iPad was hidden somewhere. I think it doesn't matter so much which one you choose though, as long as it tells you what fingers you are allowed to use for what keys. The challenge that we set for him was to perform the exercises…

Thanks! I started my kid with Scratch. Then had him do some of the Hour of Code challenges on Code.org and then some of their courses (recommended). Did a couple Arduino projects programmed with ArduBlock. Now we are working with a VEXIQ kit from Vex Robotics and working our way through the RobotC course. All graphical programming so far. Want to start looking under the hood at the actual code soon.

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by cup-of-tea »

kibwen wrote: post #59

I'm confused here. The article implies that kids aren't learning how to type because they don't have access to a PC at home. But for the majority of the history of computing, it was the case that most people wouldn't have had access to a PC at home as children. My parents learned to type on typewriters at college. I had a mandatory class entirely dedicated to typing in middle school. Have schools stopped offering com…

Some of my teachers knew how to touch type. We were never taught. Nowadays I work with people who type with two fingers. I'm 30 and live in the UK. The ball has been dropped on computer skills. Anyone can say they "know Microsoft Office" but they won't be tested on it and nobody ever talks about typing as a skill.

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

#358

Post by skgoa »

corpMaverick wrote: post #341
skgoa wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back in Sumeria they used to go on and on about how this newfangled writing thing would destroy civilization because it took the personal element out of interpersonal communication. I remember reading an old rant by someone (I want to say letter sent to a newspaper) who complained that the grammophone will destroy music.

We still consume music but we don't play it ourselves anymore. We are missing on the many benefits(i.e. enjoyment, meaning, mastery). Same with drawing, painting and many other arts.

Who is this "we"? I know lots of people who play music recreationally. Same with drawing, painting and many other arts.

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

#359

Post by dev_north_east »

victorvation wrote: post #98
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 find this type of neo-Luddism to be a strange form of gatekeeping for technologists. "Back-in-my-day"-ism for Google and manpages and the computer mouse.

I know plenty of parents who let their 3/4 year olds "play" away with tablets. Like really, they give toddlers internet connected devices and let's be honest they're not always supervised. Or even most of the time from what I've seen. It's the modern pacifier. When some of the kids come over to ours to play, their withdrawl from the devices becomes very bad. I won't let my kids near tablets/smart-phones. When they're a bit older, they can start their journey on a family desktop in the sitting room. Call me a neo-Luddite all you want, I have a feeling all other things being equal my kids will have a better chance at life than the ones left to explore Youtube on their own before mastering how to cycle a bike.

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

#360

Post by dkersten »

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.

I find that the closer my typing speed is to my thinking speed (be it fast or slow), the better. If my typing lags behind my thinking, I have to slow down my thoughts or I’ll forget what I’m typing, but if I slow down my thoughts I can lose my way there and either forget what point I’m trying to make as I get bogged down in typing it, or my mind drifts. If my thoughts are slower than my typing, I can slow down my typing without detriment, but if my typing is slower than my thinking, it may be detrimental (not always, of course, but it sometimes is).

Therefore, yes, I benefit from >60wpm typing. Not all the time, maybe not even that often, but it definitely does happen.

In programming, my thoughts are usually slow enough and I only need to type in bursts, but sometimes it takes a lot of code to represent a small idea and I need to turn it into code asap before my mind drifts and the house of cards gets shaken up.

(The above makes it sound like I lack focus, that’s not really true and my mind doesn’t always drift, but in this world of noisy open plan offices, it’s not hard to get distracted in some small way, enough to be detrimental)

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