Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 2 days agoCurrent students generally have horrendous computer literacy. There was only about a 20ish year window where using a computer meant you were forced to become vaguely proficient in how it worked. Toward the end of the 90s into the 2000s plug and play began to work more reliably, then 10 years after that smartphone popularity took off and it’s been apps ever since.
Students in high school this year were born from ~2007-2011. Most of them probably had a smartphone before a computer, if they even had the latter at all.
First people didn’t really understand computers, so we taught about them to children - back in late 90’s when I was in school, we had a few years of dedicated computer classes every week.
People then started to assume kids just “know” computers (“digital native” and all that) and we stopped teaching them because hey, they know it already.
And now we are suddenly surprised that kids don’t know how to use computers.
I agree with that to a certain extent, but computer classes (at least where I grew up) weren’t very comprehensive or germane to the skills people are talking about in this thread. If I think back, in elementary school we mostly had a few educational programs (typing, spelling, oregon trail, etc), and in middle school we did some stuff with excel and I’m sure some other things I’m forgetting, but we definitely didn’t have anything about how computers fundamentally worked. Maybe there was some very simple coding in basic, but it would’ve been very limited.
The reason I learned how to mess around with files and things was because computers simply weren’t very easy to use. Trying to get games running when they didn’t work just out of the box was a great teaching tool. Early on you had to learn the DOS commands (which by necessity meant learning file menus), and in windows (I can’t speak to anything Mac related) before plug and play worked well there was still endless tinkering you had to do with config files. Like you get the game installed but the sound doesn’t work, so you have to edit the config files to try different channels for your soundblaster. Or maybe your new printer won’t print, so you have to search online for the dll files you need.
There just stopped being a need to learn how to do anything like that, so the functioning of computers became that much less understood. I agree that the whole digital native narrative was dumb and hurt children’s learning (if anything the generation who dealt with the problems outline above are much closer to digital “natives”), and there’s a ton of stuff computer classes should be teaching these days. But classes will always only be effective in a limited capacity compared to learning about something because you need or want it to work for you in your life outside of school.
FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 2 days ago
Even university students studying computer science don’t have this basic knowledge anymore.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
It’s a sample of 1, but we hired a guy with a CS Master’s degree. I told him in polite ways that he should not use ChatGPT and his code sucked. When he was told to fix something, he rewrote it completely with a new prompt instead of understanding bugs. He didn’t last more than 2 months.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Damn, I never even thought of the implications for compsci. That’s gotta be an interesting challenge for profs these days.