Unfortunately the tech literate of us are in the minority.
Almost all consumer tech is targeted to the lowest common denominator which is either Dorris, the 68 year old lady from you legal department who prints off emails to read them. Or Jessylyn the Zoomer thats only ever used an iPhone and cant learn anything that take longer than 10 seconds to teach.
This has me wondering, are young people actually getting LESS pc literate? I’m sure there’s studies about that? It’s never occurred to me that growing up with computers but without smartphones was peak conditions for becoming tech literate.
Can confirm this. I teach a programming class and about two years ago my brain exploded when I was helping a student debug a problem said “o, you tried to reference the file but it’s actually up one directory and inside another one so you’ll need to include the full (relative) path”
The blank look of “what the hell are you talking about” threw me for a loop. So, then we talked about file systems for awhile…
I’ve done support for sysadmins and I’ve run into a lot of them who don’t understand the concept of relative or absolute paths. A couple weeks ago I had to explain how password hashing works to people working for a huge aerospace company.
I think most people learn to use computers like they learn to use a car, in that they understand the rituals they need to perform to get it to do the thing they want. They lack understanding of what’s going on under the hood so when something goes wrong they can’t fall back on knowledge and figure out what went wrong, they have to learn an entirely new routine to fix it instead of learning the principles and thinking critically.
Unfortunately the tech literate of us are in the minority.
Almost all consumer tech is targeted to the lowest common denominator which is either Dorris, the 68 year old lady from you legal department who prints off emails to read them. Or Jessylyn the Zoomer thats only ever used an iPhone and cant learn anything that take longer than 10 seconds to teach.
This has me wondering, are young people actually getting LESS pc literate? I’m sure there’s studies about that? It’s never occurred to me that growing up with computers but without smartphones was peak conditions for becoming tech literate.
Yes. They don’t even know where to find files during their college classes
Can confirm this. I teach a programming class and about two years ago my brain exploded when I was helping a student debug a problem said “o, you tried to reference the file but it’s actually up one directory and inside another one so you’ll need to include the full (relative) path”
The blank look of “what the hell are you talking about” threw me for a loop. So, then we talked about file systems for awhile…
I’ve done support for sysadmins and I’ve run into a lot of them who don’t understand the concept of relative or absolute paths. A couple weeks ago I had to explain how password hashing works to people working for a huge aerospace company.
I think most people learn to use computers like they learn to use a car, in that they understand the rituals they need to perform to get it to do the thing they want. They lack understanding of what’s going on under the hood so when something goes wrong they can’t fall back on knowledge and figure out what went wrong, they have to learn an entirely new routine to fix it instead of learning the principles and thinking critically.