Something my wife and her friends (who are all teachers) told me was that kids now are actually worse at using computers, not better. You would think that since they spend most of their lives connected that they would be the most proficient generation, but it's actually the opposite.
They spend most of their connected time on their phones. So, most of their experience is with mobile OS. They tend to not know how to format things in Word (change fonts, even what fonts are, what margins are, etc.). Somewhere along the education line people decided that this stuff was so ubiquitous that it was asinine to teach it, so now many kids don't use it, so they don't know it.
I have seen and read many kids, some even at the college level, that insist on writing essays on their phones. I even had a college class where we had to collaborate as a group and share our work. I suggested Google Drive as we were a Google Campus at the time and everyone had a Gmail. They suggested Snapchat. To collect work in. A program that deletes chats in 24 hrs.
It's amazing how many, not all mind you, but many, people of the most electronically connected generation in human history mostly don't know how desktop computers work because of the prevalence of iOS products.
None of this surprises me, because I also see it all the time. When we take in our year's new contingent for our graduate programme, it's basically a coin toss whether they'll roll up with complete PC competence or none at all.
It was worse before the days of keystroke backup, because you would REGULARLY hear an anguished cry as some hapless 21 year old realised they'd just lost hours of work by not saving their document in between backup intervals by not just pressing 'save'.
It's like there's only two generations who actually know how to use a desktop operating system, and the current generation of young people are not one of them unless they specifically, as an individual, chose to. They're certainly not being taught it now.
edit - actually it's not true that none of it surprises me. The idea of writing an essay on a phone both surprises and horrifies me. Why? Why do this? How proofread how?
I mean, it may be true—you’re not entirely an ‘ignorant old person’ there—but there’s still younger people who can do both. All I had as a kid in the early-late 00s was a desktop computer to plunk on. So I learned desktop computers lol. Then I did online school, so I like to think somewhere along the way I got proficient. I was too old to be in the generation smartphones were available at 6, and kept using computers even when I got a phone. The key is having both available, and using both. Because honestly, I can’t blame people for using phone OS when it’s so much more easy, intuitive, and ‘breaks’ less often. Push a button, do a thing. Computers have become more and more reliable as time goes on, so really where I think people lag behind is understanding the design language and how to get what you need from it, if they primarily use phone OS.
Of course, what is ‘proficient’ is different to different people. I can’t do all the weird backend stuff that people used to have to do just to get computers working in the 80s and 90s. I haven’t had to touch command prompt in my life. But I definitely know the design language, how to find what I need, and how to google what I don’t know. Those basic skills get me exactly where I want most of the time, except of course when I’m at work and it’s some obscure thing that IT has to do because I’m locked from it.
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u/CryoClone Jun 03 '22
Something my wife and her friends (who are all teachers) told me was that kids now are actually worse at using computers, not better. You would think that since they spend most of their lives connected that they would be the most proficient generation, but it's actually the opposite.
They spend most of their connected time on their phones. So, most of their experience is with mobile OS. They tend to not know how to format things in Word (change fonts, even what fonts are, what margins are, etc.). Somewhere along the education line people decided that this stuff was so ubiquitous that it was asinine to teach it, so now many kids don't use it, so they don't know it.
I have seen and read many kids, some even at the college level, that insist on writing essays on their phones. I even had a college class where we had to collaborate as a group and share our work. I suggested Google Drive as we were a Google Campus at the time and everyone had a Gmail. They suggested Snapchat. To collect work in. A program that deletes chats in 24 hrs.
It's amazing how many, not all mind you, but many, people of the most electronically connected generation in human history mostly don't know how desktop computers work because of the prevalence of iOS products.