Children don't know how to use computers ... And this is why it should bother you.

_{Original: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/}

Many letters? Well, why don't you watch the five-second video with a kitten stuck in a roll of toilet paper, or not read the 140-character description of the dish your friend has filled his mouth with. " Yum-yum ." This post is not for you.

The telephone rang in the office. It was one of the school secretaries. He said that a visitor had come to whom he needed to connect to the school WiFi network. Taking the iPad, I trotted down to the waiting room, where I saw a young lady of more than twenty years old sitting in a chair with a MacBook on her lap.
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I smiled and introduced myself, sitting down next to her. She silently handed me a MacBook, and her expression said it all: " Repair my computer, geek, and quickly ." I was confused with the technician enough times for confident recognition of this grimace.

- We'll have to hurry. I have a lesson in 5 minutes, ”I said.
- Do you teach?
- This is my job, it just happened that I also have to manage a team of network specialists.

She changed her attitude towards me. Instead of a faceless, snapping on the keyboard, a socially unsuitable, sexually inexperienced networked monkey, now she saw a colleague in me. For people like her, technology is a necessary inconvenience. She would be happy to ignore them, joke about them behind the eyes or chuckle openly, but she knows that when she cannot display her PowerPoint on the interactive screen, she will need a technician, so she hides behind the courtesy facade and at the same time internally rejects communication with them because they are too weird to deal with.

I looked at the macbook. At that time, I had no experience with OS X. But Jobs was not an idiot, and what was displayed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen was the well-known WiFi symbol. It took me a few seconds to connect the device to the network.

I handed the MacBook back, and the woman opened Safari. "The Internet is not working," she stated with disdain.

I have heard this phrase from students and staff so many times that I have already prepared a standard reaction. I usually take out a cell phone, pretend to dial a number. And picking up the phone to my ear, I say: “ Yes, connect me to the office of the President of the United States ... NO, I CAN'T WAIT, this is an emergency ... Hello, Mr. President, I'm afraid I have bad news. I was just informed that the Internet is not working . ”

But I decided that the young woman probably wouldn't appreciate the sarcasm, and took the MacBook back to add proxy settings. Without any idea how to do this in OS X. We use a proxy to make sure that staff and students cannot access porn from the school network. It also filters violence, extremism, curses, social networks, alcohol, smoking, hacking, games, and streaming video. It's funny that when you search Google for “proxy settings OSX”, the results will be blocked because they contain the word “proxy” and it is filtered.

“You do not know where the proxy settings are?” I asked hopefully.

I received no answer. With the same success you could ask her “Can you tell me how I can reticulate splines using the hexagonal decoding system so that I can create a VisualBasic GUI and track the IP address?”



I found the proxy settings and filled out in ten seconds. I returned the MacBook to her, and she literally closed Safari and opened it again, instead of refreshing the page. "Pasib ...". The gratitude was overwhelming.

I already left when she stopped me. "PowerPoint is not working."


This probably no longer gives the right to a phone call to the President of the United States. I am sure that he is interested in technological problems, but the fall of the world's leading tool for creating presentations will be rather a relief for him, perhaps. At least the NSA will not lose a poorly designed slide show.



I had to sit back and take over the MacBook again. The slide that she opened contained an embedded video from YouTube, and as I said, streaming video is blocked. I tried to explain it to the woman, and then she patronized me to explain that it didn’t matter, because the video was in her PowerPoint and played from her flash drive. I did not argue, it was not worth my time. It’s better to do what I usually do for people, and just make it work . Using my iPad's 3G connection, I set up an access point, downloaded a video from YouTube, using a popular download service, and then embedded a local video in its presentation.

- And what do you teach? She asked while I was working on her presentation.
- Computing technology - I replied.
- Oh ... I think in our time you are faced with the fact that children know more about computers than teachers ...

If you are teaching information technology or computing, this is a phrase you have heard a million times, a billion times, a million times. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you have heard it repeatedly. There are different versions of this phrase, all praising the technical abilities of today's children. My favorite - from parents. "Oh, Johnny will easily become the best computer specialist, he is constantly at home at the computer." Parents seem to have a vague theory that spending a few hours each night on Facebook and YouTube transmits, through a special kind of cybernetic fluid, knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

Usually, when someone speaks this nonsense, I just nod and smile. But this time I just could not help it. “Actually, no, most children do not know how to use computers” ( just as you do not know how - I did not add).

She was surprised at my objection to what is usually accepted as a truism. In the end, aren't teenagers digital natives? They have laptops, tablets, gaming consoles, smartphones - of course, they should be the most technologically advanced ethnic group on the planet. The bell rang, and I really needed to have a lesson, so there was no time to explain my theories to her about why children do not know how to use computers. She may be reading my blog.

The truth is that children do not know how to use general-purpose computers, like most of the adults I know. The school has a very narrow circle of people whom I consider technically advanced. These are people from thirty to forty years old who have had a computer for most of their adult life. Of course, there are exceptions among the staff and among students. There are always one or two students in each group who have already chosen programming or web development, or can take the computer apart, replace the motherboard and reinstall the operating system. Also, there are usually a couple of teachers outside the designated age limits, often from mathematical and scientific departments, which their school laptops only strain, because there they have no administrator privileges. But such people are few.

I think, before continuing, I need to define what it means to “do not know how to use a computer,” in my understanding. Since I am a network administrator and at the same time a teacher, I am often the first point of contact when a teacher or student has problems with computers and their associated devices. As my lead technician likes to state, “the problem is usually in the interface between the chair and the keyboard .” Here are some examples of problems that I encounter quite regularly.

A sixth grader brings me his laptop, explaining that it is very slow and turns off. The laptop literally squeals, the coolers are spinning to the full extent and the case is uncomfortably hot to the touch. I launch Task Manager and see that the CPU is 100% loaded, although only uTorrent is running (which, suddenly, has 200 torrent files on hand). I looked around, which processes were running, and there were a lot of them, eating CPU and RAM. Moreover, I could not turn off any of them. “What antivirus do you use?” I asked to hear that he does not like antiviruses, as they slow down the computer. I returned the laptop to him, and said that he was infected. He asked what he needed to do, and I suggested that he should reinstall Windows. He looked at me helplessly. He does not know how to use a computer.

The girl raised her hand in class. “My computer won't turn on,” she said. With despair in her voice, implying that she had tried every conceivable way to make a piece of iron work. I went up, turned on the monitor, and the screen came to life, displaying the Windows login window. She does not know how to use a computer.

The teacher brought me her laptop. “The damn piece of iron doesn't connect to the Internet,” she said angrily, as if it were my fault. “I had to do tons of work last night, but I couldn’t go online at all. Even my husband tried and could not do anything, but he is well versed in computers. ” I took the delinquent laptop, switched the wireless switch on the side edge, and brought it back. Neither she nor her husband can use a computer.

The child knocked on the door of my office and complained that he could not log in. “Did you forget the password?” I asked, but he insisted that it was not. “What was the error message?” I asked. He shrugged. I went with him to the IT wing, and watched him enter his login and password. A window appeared with a message, but the child clicked OK so quickly that I did not have time to read. The process was repeated three times, as if the computer could suddenly change its mind and allow access to the network. On the third attempt, I caught a glimpse of the message. I climbed over his computer and plugged in an Ethernet cable. He does not know how to use a computer.

The teacher brought me her brand new iPhone, the previous one was destroyed. She lost all contact and was very upset. I asked if she had ever connected an iPhone to her computer, but she could not remember. I asked to bring a laptop and iPhone. When she brought them the next day, I restored the iPhone from a backup on the laptop. She got back her contacts as well as photos. She's happy. She does not know how to use a computer.

The teacher called me at the office, complaining that there was “no internet” on his laptop. I went down to class. He said that yesterday the Internet was, and today it disappeared. His desktop is a solid wall of Microsoft Office document icons randomly arranged. I tried to quickly explain that the desktop is not the best place to store documents, since they are not reserved on the server, but he did not care, he just wanted the Internet back. I went to the start menu and clicked on Internet Explorer, it opened and displayed the home page. A colleague explained that the Internet was on the desktop, but is now missing. I closed IE and looked at the desktop, eventually finding a little blue “e” buried among PowerPoint and Excel icons. Pointed at her. A colleague pointed to another location on the screen, and stated that the icon should be there. I dragged the icon to the desired position. He is happy. He does not know how to use a computer.

The child raised his hand. Told me that there is a virus on his computer. I looked at the screen. What was displayed in the web browser looked like an XP dialog box, warning you that your computer was infected and offering to download software for scanning and removing viruses. It is on a machine with Windows 7. I closed the evil tab. He does not know how to use a computer.

Not being able to use a computer is considered acceptable if you are twenty-five years old or more. This is something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the widespread wisdom says that everyone under the age of 18 is technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, in particular - web applications. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They also know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall the operating system - and they are lost. Ask them to replace the hard drive or RAM - and they are covered with cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it matters - and they will look at you as if you are speaking Klingon.

They shake "OK" in the dialog boxes without reading the message. They choose passwords like qwerty1234. They turn off the computer by holding down the power button until the monitor goes out. They leave the computer with an open session, leaving the room. If the program freezes, they press the same button over and over until everything is complete.

How the hell are we in this situation? How can a generation with access to so many technologies not know how to use them?

Parents

I screwed up, and I'm sure many of you too. When we bought the Xbox, it was Techno-Daddy to the rescue . I happily played with a bunch of cables and then created profiles for all. When my son's MacBook got infected with FlashBack, Techno-Papa rushes to help . I looked through a couple of online manuals and huddled deep into the terminal until I eradicated this bad guy. When we bought “Family Raspberry Pi” - Techno-Papa is in a hurry to help . I collected all this, flashed the OS onto the SD card, and proudly sat down, wondering why no one except me wanted to use the damn thing. All their lives, I did it for them. I installed new hardware, new software, and acted as a home technician, as soon as something went wrong. In the end, I have a family of digital ignoramuses.

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© Marc Scott, Jul 29th, 2013

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