This is turning a generation of people tech illiterate. The young people I interact with are smart because they’re all employed by a tech company and mentored by us dinosaurs, but I’ve heard some horror stories of the tech literacy of the average young person.
I’m an IT teacher at a community centre, I genuinely never thought I would see the day when a student younger than me enrolled. I wrongly assumed my role as a public educator would just fade out as younger generations required generally less training around computers.
Obviously courses in disability service centres would remain, and accredited training for people to kick off or retarget their careers would still exist.
But the person at the local library who meets twice a week and teaches grandma how to close the tabs on her phone felt like a job that was destined to die.
I’m in my 30s and this year I have a few teenagers in my class. The conversations are hilarious, they don’t know how to read a file location adreess or open a program that isn’t pinned to the taskbar, but at the same time, I don’t know how to access the notifications bar on an iPhone or quickly find the wifi settings without going through general settings…because I went from windows to 98, to a blackberry, to an Android, just like they went from an ipad toddler to an iPhone teen, and only now are they having Windows 11 thrown at them, and of all the computers to try and learn to use, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation (but it’s what our government funds us to teach 🤷♀️)
The skill divide is so hard to explain too. My elderly students just stare blankly at one screen, overwhelmed and confused, unsure how to recognise anything. Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them. There is often a lot of hand holding which can be frustrating especially when you made a huge breakthrough in their confidence and independence only to have come in the next week feeling insecure about their skills because they’ve forgotten a little bit, or had a bad spam caller over the weekend who made them want to never touch a computer again.
Then the teens, who know what links look like and generally what they do will rush ahead, they may not know what it is exactly they’re trying to do, but they think they know what end result is expected and they generally know how to avoid catastrophic issues so they just barrel ahead, I’ll see them make 40 clicks a second for something that usually takes 2, because they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.
I had a project last week. Dead simple. Save a linked file to a target location, import the file into another program through either drag and drop or browsing for the file, then change 1 thing, and export the final file into another target location, as specified on the activity sheet.
Barely 5 minutes in, I’m still helping Brenda get her mouse dongle plugged in, and one of the teens is finished. And yes, they have every file I asked for, and every edit I asked for, but both are just sitting in the downloads folder. And now we’re at the end looking back, the teen is confused because they have the edited file that is required to "finish*, how is it wrong, and I’m trying to explain why skipping the steps about target locations means they’ll have to start again because this activity is all about target locations and I don’t actually give two shits about this file I just need them to put things in and out of a folder until they can explain to me “a folder is a container” and not just stare into space because a folder is a black hole on their phone things they save go to until they need them again and just download them again.
Stuff like that are infuriating. I’m in high school and there’s an animation class.
The teacher has very clearly told the class about a million times to save the files in OneDrive/2024/Animation/
People are still saving it in downloads or documents or somewhere else and then saying they forgot where they saved it and did nothing the whole class.
I’m a Millenial, and it’s been wild to see how i’m basically near the top of the bell curve when it comes to understanding the basics of using computers. Like you, I thought general computer illiteracy would die with the Boomers… but here we are.
Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them.
That’s because modern UI designers are all about form over function. UI rules were worked out 40 years ago with the first gui’s. But you don’t get a promotion for maintaining code. So everyone has to do something different to get noticed.
So now we have UI’s where interactive and non interactive elements are mixed without any visual distinction.
For better or worse, we’re going the way of “the car guy”. It used to be something everyone needed to know a little bit about, but now fades into the background with a handful of experts.
I’m car guy, IT guy, home maintenance guy, and electronics repair guy.
I learned how to do everything because I’m a cheap ass that won’t replace what can be fixed and won’t pay to have something be fixed when I can manage it myself.
I got 240,000 miles on a car right now and it’s never seen the inside of a shop. Last big screen TV was free because it was broken and then I soldered new LEDS on to fix it. Paid $25 for an $800 dishwasher that just needed disassembling and cleaning. Also $25 for a front load whirlpool washing machine with a broken internal lock mechanism that I repaired. Same for a dryer with bad rollers inside.
People blow way too much money on buying new stuff instead of just learning how to fix and maintain things now. /old man rant
As long as the non-experts somehow manage to make a living to pay for our expertise. I heard a coworker vent about her son who wants to drop out of school (assuming elementary / middle) to focus on his streaming career…
Yes, this is much worse than when a bunch of old people were upset when young people didn’t know how to use a telegraph/party line/rotary dial/gramophone/touchtone/turntable/fax/dialup modem/cassette deck/etc. Because now it’s happening now, and back then it was happening then.
The difference is all that stuff went away, traditional desktop computers aren’t going anywhere. Sure, you can probably manage fine at home with just a phone, but not in a lot of jobs.
Your phone is measuring time by counting how many seconds has passed since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC. Doesn’t matter if you’re on android or apple, the OS is based on ideas of Bell Labs people’s ideas from the 1960’s.
This is turning a generation of people tech illiterate. The young people I interact with are smart because they’re all employed by a tech company and mentored by us dinosaurs, but I’ve heard some horror stories of the tech literacy of the average young person.
Touchscreen was a mistake.
I’m an IT teacher at a community centre, I genuinely never thought I would see the day when a student younger than me enrolled. I wrongly assumed my role as a public educator would just fade out as younger generations required generally less training around computers.
Obviously courses in disability service centres would remain, and accredited training for people to kick off or retarget their careers would still exist.
But the person at the local library who meets twice a week and teaches grandma how to close the tabs on her phone felt like a job that was destined to die.
I’m in my 30s and this year I have a few teenagers in my class. The conversations are hilarious, they don’t know how to read a file location adreess or open a program that isn’t pinned to the taskbar, but at the same time, I don’t know how to access the notifications bar on an iPhone or quickly find the wifi settings without going through general settings…because I went from windows to 98, to a blackberry, to an Android, just like they went from an ipad toddler to an iPhone teen, and only now are they having Windows 11 thrown at them, and of all the computers to try and learn to use, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation (but it’s what our government funds us to teach 🤷♀️)
The skill divide is so hard to explain too. My elderly students just stare blankly at one screen, overwhelmed and confused, unsure how to recognise anything. Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them. There is often a lot of hand holding which can be frustrating especially when you made a huge breakthrough in their confidence and independence only to have come in the next week feeling insecure about their skills because they’ve forgotten a little bit, or had a bad spam caller over the weekend who made them want to never touch a computer again.
Then the teens, who know what links look like and generally what they do will rush ahead, they may not know what it is exactly they’re trying to do, but they think they know what end result is expected and they generally know how to avoid catastrophic issues so they just barrel ahead, I’ll see them make 40 clicks a second for something that usually takes 2, because they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.
I had a project last week. Dead simple. Save a linked file to a target location, import the file into another program through either drag and drop or browsing for the file, then change 1 thing, and export the final file into another target location, as specified on the activity sheet.
Barely 5 minutes in, I’m still helping Brenda get her mouse dongle plugged in, and one of the teens is finished. And yes, they have every file I asked for, and every edit I asked for, but both are just sitting in the downloads folder. And now we’re at the end looking back, the teen is confused because they have the edited file that is required to "finish*, how is it wrong, and I’m trying to explain why skipping the steps about target locations means they’ll have to start again because this activity is all about target locations and I don’t actually give two shits about this file I just need them to put things in and out of a folder until they can explain to me “a folder is a container” and not just stare into space because a folder is a black hole on their phone things they save go to until they need them again and just download them again.
Stuff like that are infuriating. I’m in high school and there’s an animation class.
The teacher has very clearly told the class about a million times to save the files in
OneDrive/2024/Animation/People are still saving it in downloads or documents or somewhere else and then saying they forgot where they saved it and did nothing the whole class.
I’m a Millenial, and it’s been wild to see how i’m basically near the top of the bell curve when it comes to understanding the basics of using computers. Like you, I thought general computer illiteracy would die with the Boomers… but here we are.
That’s because modern UI designers are all about form over function. UI rules were worked out 40 years ago with the first gui’s. But you don’t get a promotion for maintaining code. So everyone has to do something different to get noticed.
So now we have UI’s where interactive and non interactive elements are mixed without any visual distinction.
For better or worse, we’re going the way of “the car guy”. It used to be something everyone needed to know a little bit about, but now fades into the background with a handful of experts.
I’m car guy, IT guy, home maintenance guy, and electronics repair guy.
I learned how to do everything because I’m a cheap ass that won’t replace what can be fixed and won’t pay to have something be fixed when I can manage it myself.
I got 240,000 miles on a car right now and it’s never seen the inside of a shop. Last big screen TV was free because it was broken and then I soldered new LEDS on to fix it. Paid $25 for an $800 dishwasher that just needed disassembling and cleaning. Also $25 for a front load whirlpool washing machine with a broken internal lock mechanism that I repaired. Same for a dryer with bad rollers inside.
People blow way too much money on buying new stuff instead of just learning how to fix and maintain things now. /old man rant
Damn that’s a good way to put it.
As long as the non-experts somehow manage to make a living to pay for our expertise. I heard a coworker vent about her son who wants to drop out of school (assuming elementary / middle) to focus on his streaming career…
Touch input isn’t the problem. Hiding the file system is.
Yup. I teach at a university. It used to be adequate for instructions to say something along the lines of
open the file
C://Folder/anotherfolder/subfolder/document.extI encounter more and more students every year that have no idea how to do this.
Your path syntax is wrong tho…
To be fair, Android is absolutely atrocious whenever files are involved.
Had and have magnitudes of more problems with file management on iOS; it has improved a bit with a basic native file browser.
Still can’t rename file extensions though
I just tried with the default files app. You can definitely rename file extensions.
Wow you’re right. Just checked again, they must have added that this new major iOS version.
Is there some higher level thing preventing this?
If I open a terminal on my galaxy s23 I don’t see anything special with file extensions:
I was talking about files on iOS.
Don’t need the terminal for that. I can use Google Files to rename a pdf to .txt and it opens in a text editor
Don’t need the Google Files for that. I can use the terminal to rename a file.
Yes, this is much worse than when a bunch of old people were upset when young people didn’t know how to use a telegraph/party line/rotary dial/gramophone/touchtone/turntable/fax/dialup modem/cassette deck/etc. Because now it’s happening now, and back then it was happening then.
The difference is all that stuff went away, traditional desktop computers aren’t going anywhere. Sure, you can probably manage fine at home with just a phone, but not in a lot of jobs.
Your phone is measuring time by counting how many seconds has passed since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC. Doesn’t matter if you’re on android or apple, the OS is based on ideas of Bell Labs people’s ideas from the 1960’s.