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Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

coding2learn.org

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Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#391

Post by bane »

simonsarris wrote: post #36

I get the feeling that the author was judging the person he was helping far more harshly than the perceived judgement she might have passed on him. Maybe she was tired, clearly she was frustrated, but it wasn't obvious that she held the author in any disdain, though the author seemed to perceive it. What we're sure of is that the author held her in such low regard. I wonder if she picked up on that. I suspect she did…

> Of course people can't use computers. They're not trying to use computers. They're trying to get X done. The computer is a device that, most of the time, just gets in the way of doing X.

Far too many times, "Computer Nerds" think that using a computer == getting X done -- because X for them is satisfying some arcane ritual to get some computer usage accomplished.

I'm reminded of Nick Burns from SNL

http://vimeo.com/24762526

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#392

Post by etherael »

angersock wrote: post #86

So, here's some different themes in the thread so far, some ideas spawned from the article, and thoughts on them: Author is a jerk for the TLDR at the beginning Sure--it's unfortunate that such a red herring was thrown into an otherwise excellent article. Normal people shouldn't have to learn how to into computer. This is unreasonable. "People don't want to learn how to computer, they want to learn how to get X done"…

> For anyone who's been paying attention to the darker subtext of the PRISM scandal, you can draw the uncomfortable conclusion that the government is saying: "Hey, tech sector, guess what--the halcyon days of your industry ignoring us are over. We matter, we command, and you obey. Get back into line."

You're the first I've seen to explicitly come to this phrasing, but I can't help thinking that this might be exactly what enrages me so much about their policies.

It feels like being lectured on appropriate behaviour by a pack of half blind chronically delusional half wits who even on top of their massive deficiencies and ignorance have the nerve to condescend in their demands.

Their laughably unjustified hubris needs to bite them, hard.

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#393

Post by NoodleIncident »

I didn't agree with most of the article, but the bit about the Microsoft Office curriculum is completely true.

In high school, I wanted to take my school's generic AP Java class. To get to even such a basic level of CS education, I had to sit through _years_ of MS Office and Adobe classes. Thankfully, the workload was so low, I was able to teach myself TI Basic and Actionscript, but those classes were jokes.

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#394

Post by aufreak3 »

simonsarris wrote: post #36

I get the feeling that the author was judging the person he was helping far more harshly than the perceived judgement she might have passed on him. Maybe she was tired, clearly she was frustrated, but it wasn't obvious that she held the author in any disdain, though the author seemed to perceive it. What we're sure of is that the author held her in such low regard. I wonder if she picked up on that. I suspect she did…

I believe you're just reading the surface message here. When I read the article, what I felt was "man, he's really railing against a general decline in curiosity". To paraphrase Marvin of HHGttG fame, our computers may lament so -- here I am, a GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER in your pocket, and all you ask me to do is to tell your friends what you had for lunch?

Sadly, I've been part of this decline in curiosity as well. My son, when he was 4 years old, reminded me of that unadulterated fascination. (translated)

    son: "Look, dad!" 
    me: (looking up) "What?"
    son: "Tree!"
... and I humbly thanked him for the lesson of missing a magnificent glorious tree right there in front of my eyes. Its a tree! It made itself mostly from the contents of air by trapping energy from the sun! How cool is that!

All that said, the above anecdote is promising too. If only, we'd nurture our kids curiosity without providing canned solutions for them all the time, as the OP says.

Again, different people are curious about different things. Some are curious about the workings of things around them, some about their origins/history, some about people, some about societies, some about how people think, some about plants and animals and life, some about the planet and the stars ... and some about stuff that they think has-nothing-to-do-whateosver-with-anything-but-in-the-end-hell-it-does (hint - math).

Perhaps we're in an era where polymaths are rare, but curiosity, though heavily fragmented, does live on.

edit: area->era

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#395

Post by NoodleIncident »

ceol wrote: post #383
simonsarris wrote: post #36

I get the feeling that the author was judging the person he was helping far more harshly than the perceived judgement she might have passed on him. Maybe she was tired, clearly she was frustrated, but it wasn't obvious that she held the author in any disdain, though the author seemed to perceive it. What we're sure of is that the author held her in such low regard. I wonder if she picked up on that. I suspect she did…

I thought the author made a bunch of assumptions about her, too. Things like: She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. *Fix my computer geek, and hurry up about it.* That's quite a leap from merely the look on her face that you saw for all of 2 seconds before taking her laptop. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She’d be quite happy to ignore them all, joke abou…

So what you are saying is that through some combination of luck and circumstance, you have never been treated like this?

Good for you. Now stop calling people who have been liars.

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#396

Post by jotm »

GuiA wrote: post #90
simonsarris wrote: post #36

I get the feeling that the author was judging the person he was helping far more harshly than the perceived judgement she might have passed on him. Maybe she was tired, clearly she was frustrated, but it wasn't obvious that she held the author in any disdain, though the author seemed to perceive it. What we're sure of is that the author held her in such low regard. I wonder if she picked up on that. I suspect she did…

This guy sounds like he has a chip on his shoulder. As you pointed out: >The first rule of any educator is to never, under any circumstances, make someone feel inept. And it was so easily avoidable here. There are many sentences in this article indicating that this is not an isolated, unique reaction from the poster. This paragraph especially irked me: > I’ve messed up, as I’m sure many of you have. When we purchased…

| Well, maybe it shouldn't have been "techno dad to the rescue", but rather "dad spending a moment with his kids showing them how to setup a raspberry pi/their xbox/etc.".

Tell that to my brother - every single time I try to explain as carefully as possible, going step by step, making him repeat the steps to make sure he knows how to do it. Aaand two weeks later he's got the same problem and is calling me to fix it... Some people just don't want to understand...

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#397

Post by bphogan »

angersock wrote: post #161
_xzxj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, when I was a kid whenever I broke something on the computer it was my responsibility to fix it. My parents told me I broke it, so I'm able to fix it. So this particular paragraph really actually resonated with me, because if it weren't for my parents going "Well, you broke it, if you don't fix it it's going to stay broken." I probably wouldn't be nearly as computer savvy as I am today, and I probab…

I got to play games because I learned the magic of memmaker.exe, autoexec.bat, config.sys, and boot disks. And I was motivated to learn how to fix things back when they broke because I shared a PC with my dad, who used it for consulting work--and who did not take kindly to service outages.

Hi. Are you me? :)

That's exactly how I learned this stuff. The damn game wouldn't play, so I had to make a boot disk.

Then I learned to make a bootdisk with a menu system called from the autoexec.bat - cos I realized that several games had the same emm386 requirements. And now I program things.

Ahh good times... good times.

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#398

Post by krzyk »

345laidar wrote: post #169
Laremere wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to start reading the article, but the TL;DR dissuaded me. The article look to be a long one, and if I just committed to reading every long article on the internet I'd never get anything done. The beginning of the article should serve to get me interested and willing to invest the time to read the article, not as a snark remark to people who have already showed interest in your article by navigating to it.…

This is true. Not only does he come off as off-putting to his readers, he also seemingly is off-putting to the rest of society.

On the contrary, the TL;DR encouraged me to read the article to the bottom. I don't get it why anyone (except the ones mentioned in this tl;dr) would be offended by this.

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#399

Post by krzyk »

pastylegs wrote: post #74
Phargo wrote: post #6

Wow... "TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with it’s head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “num num”. This blog post is not for you." Snarky enough? If you start out like that I've already made the decision that you're over opinionated and probably prone to dramatic exaggeration.

I pressed back immediately after reading this opening. Not because I fall into the category of person the author describes but because I'm not bothered reading an article written by somebody who starts their blog posts by insulting their readers.

He insulted only the lazy, "don't make me think" part of the society, I always thought that HN readers are in the better half.

Re: Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you

#400

Post by krzyk »

csense wrote: post #382
H4wk_cz wrote: post #214

The county proxy is there to ensure that the staff and students can’t access porn on the school network. It also filters for violence, extremism, swearing, social networks, alcohol, smoking, hacking, gaming and streaming video. Ironically, if you were to perform a Google search for “proxy settings OSX”, the top results would all be blocked because you used the word ‘proxy’ and that is a filtered word. That was the mo…

When I was in high school, a similar filter meant the kids who didn't normally have the time of day for computer geeks were doing all kinds of independent research into proxy and VPN technology. Of course, this effect wasn't intended , and I doubt the teachers knew about it (AFAIK nobody told them, and even if they had, I doubt the message would've been understood). I think the reason they do it is liability: The sch…

I think that a better analogy would be that shops should not sell knives because one can hurt someone with it.
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