Semi-OT: Why Kids Can't use Computers

[Paul King]

I also am sick of this baseless stereotype being bandied about with my
colleagues at school that kids "know more" about computers than adults. They
are at least equally ignorant with twice the gadgets. I have also seen this
firsthand when teaching computer science that 1) their level of (general)
literacy does not go much past the 140 character limit of a Twitter message,
and 2) their level of computer literacy does not go much past knowing how to
get a lolcat YouTube video to run on their Androids. However, there are
always exceptions, exactly as the author suggested. "There are one or two
[students] in every cohort that can" replace motherboards and operating
systems. "Cohort" means the entire grade in the whole school. I think that
is a realistic ratio of literacy-to-ignorance in most schools in Canada
also.

It would be a challenging enough question for most colleagues as well as
students to just get them to distinguish between "the internet" and "the
world-wide web". Members of Parliament not making this distinction are also
writing policy on "the internet", and allowing private power to figure out
what that means. The only noticeable success in the past 20 years of the
"digital revolution" is in the amount of money made by tech companies with
something to sell to the under-18 demographic. What we really have are a
generation of un-informed consumers of digital products who don't know and
don't care about news events like Snowden and the NSA, among a whole raft of
other things. Un-informed consumers who don't know their rights and freedoms
are easy to sell to and easy to dupe. The "shut up and buy" mantra is
built-in, since they are ignorant to begin with.

For the record, I don't currently teach computer science. I teach math.

Paul King

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org [mailto:owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Colin
McGregor
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:18 PM
To: tlug
Subject: [TLUG]: Semi-OT: Why Kids Can't use Computers

Ran across this story about why kids can't use computers, and the story has
some suggestions as to how to fix that (part of the suggestion being the use
of Linux):

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


Colin McGregor
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