On 02/26/2012 06:42 AM, Judy Perry wrote:
You are correct; they have NO IDEA how their file system works. I'm
lucky if they can even recall what they named a file, and they pay
ZERO attention to file formats. One couldn't grasp the concept of
overwriting a file. Sigh.
Judy
On Tue, 14 Feb 2012, Peter Bogdanoff wrote:
When I started working at UCLA in 1996 very few students had used
computers before entering, or at least had used their own computers
rather than a lab one in grade school. Now 15 years later all have a
laptop in class. However, about 3/4 of the Mac-using students in a
music history class use Spotlight to find files and open applications
on their Macs and most of these don't know any other way to find
their files. In other words, they don't really have a clue how the
file system works. I only started to discover this when I had them
install a project that I'm developing and found out that many have
been running it from their Downloads folder and didn't know to do it
any other way.
Would you call these people computer-literate? They sure are Web and
social media literate. So the sooner OS X moves to an iOS-type Finder
the better for them. It could be that OS X is just too easy to use
and so they never learn more than Word, Google, YouTube, and
Facebook. The Windows users seem to know a little more, at least
their own version of Samsung Windows or Dell Windows, but it's only a
little more.
Peter Bogdanoff
UCLA
Speaking as a reactionary 50 year old; I think:
1. No child under the age of 14 should be allowed any mathematical
crutch apart from a slide-rule.
I find, in my "EFL" school, that kids find sliderules rather
interesting, and they are able to SEE how numbers
work; something one cannot do with a pocket calculator.
2. At 14 children should all be given something like a Pentium 2 with
FreeDOS and taught
how to navigate themselves around a system with no GUI.
3. At 14 children should be given a course in something like BASIC or
LISP on that GUI-less computer.
3.1. Probably preceded by a few weeks "doing programming" on paper, and
messing around with buttons in cups.
4. At 17-18 children should all be given a PC with an operating system
with a WIMP-GUI on it after
they have passed a test to demonstrate their familiarity with a
Terminal emulator.
It is far more IMPORTANT that kids learn to think logically and
coherently than possess fancy electronic
equipment.
------------------------------------
Why the hell most parents want to CRIPPLE their kids by lobbing them a
fancy laptop and/or hand-held at about
the same time they are toilet trained escapes me.
Richmond.
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