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The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
(www.nngroup.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.
I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.
I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email
I have seen worse. Normie's around me use their phone to capture photo of the laptop screen and send the low pixel photo with less than half part in it including the actual document.
When I ask for a screenshot I get a Word document with a picture in it about 10% of the time.
I feel like that's more a boomer thing.
I was looking at a spec from another government contractor and of course it's a scan because fuck me. While I am reading it I suddenly noticed that it was made by a typewriter.
Never a great sign.
The screenshot thing is PAINFUL and way too common by management in particular
Lol screenshot, pdf, what’s the difference really?
I hate them so much when they do that. “I don’t know how to export pdf” - yet you know how to make screenshots which is a “secret” key combination that’s written NOWHERE on the ui.
How it’s possible that they think that’s ok to send four separate emails (separate emails because they click on the screenshot preview on the bottom of the screen and share that) with a screenshot of each page instead of just the file? How they don’t think “wait, is it possible that there isn’t a better way?”
Yeah this is very much not that they don't understand there's a better way. It's that they don't care to look up how. It's pretty common. People just go oh I don't know computers and you get whatever random crap they could throw together with zero effort lol.
There's no secret to screenshots. They all have a phone.
Remember my old bomer boss who insisted I use the office scanner to scan documents instead of my phone. Not because it was better but because he paid for a scanner and wanted to get his money's worth.
PDF scales when you zoom in on it.
Really?
The PDF contains the information. The screenshot contains a picture of the information.
It's a tree vs. a picture of a tree. A recording vs. a live performance.
It’s possible to make a rasterized pdf - that would just be an image with specs for printing. I think teachers need to specify their expectations. Submit a plain text file? Submit a markdown document? Submit a Word doc? Is hand-written okay? What about a type-writer?
A pdf is just a digital version of paper, and since paper is obsolete, the pdf is probably a bit archaic for somebody who has no intention of printing it.
PDFs are searchable, zoomable (i.e. don't look like shit on high-res displays), are often much smaller, have nicer software for handling them (image viewers are usually not designed for this task), and so on.
You're joking, right? Please tell me you're joking.
I am joking
When I read "never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse" my first thought was "wow, they only ever used punched cards" until I realized you meant they only used touch screens.
I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy -- as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother's grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It's insane.
Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.
Oh I bet, and fwiw I think that's a pretty good estimate of that bell curve -- I'm just on the tail end of it, so I got to see an actual decline in tech literacy in the people literally in my immediate orbit. It was an interesting experience, for sure
I think for those of us that were born 2000 and later the amount of tech experience we have probably has a strong correlation with who was into PC gaming/modding as kids.
Most certainly.
My higher computer literacy stems solely from personal interest.
The IT education in school was basic office usage and other "normie" tasks. Not even typing classes...Still doing the 4,5 finger blind/hunt writing system.
Born in that time frame. Windows XP was just finicky as hell, no matter how much praise it got later. If you wanted your Internet to work you just had to flush the DNS cache or just disable and re-enable the interface occasionally. Hell, same for my mouse - occasionally had to use the keyboard to disable and re-enable the mouse drivers.
Now shit just works. Only reason I've had to fiddle around so much in recent years is that I used Gentoo for a couple of years. Though by the time I was bored with it, it worked better than Windows XP ever did.
I would put it up to 1999.
But the returns of 1995-1999 are very small indeed.
EDIT: Welp, I guess I just proved someone else's point.
?
Btw the ">" at the beginning starts a quote.
To prevent that put a
\before something like a*or>. Like this:\\>. Hope I could help you :)That is exactly what happened. I was trying to jokingly express anger at seeing my birth year being correlated with being tech-illiterate, so I typed a '>:(' emoji, not realizing I needed an escape-character to avoid it looking like quote.
Hope you get the same laugh out of it as I did lol
No worries, figured as much :D
we had typing class in elementary school circa 1995. that's how I got to typing 150 wpm. almost useless now because of OCR, but still.. sad to see computer skills lost these days.
I see ppl typing with 3 fingers and you have 10 of them
I learned to type from instant messaging: ICQ and AIM. I know I did Mavis Beacon too but that was the practice that solidified it.
Yeah they tried to teach me to touch type in middle school, but it was MSN messenger and using an internet-connected computer as a tool for socializing that got me to actually practice typing.
A lot of those typing things start you off with "here's the home row. Now type several strings of meaningless text. Okay, now we'll let you type g and h in addition." and then add one or two letters at a time to slowly build up typing skills. I'm the third fastest touch typist I know and I got that way hitting on coeds.
The last sentence resonates with me. I too wore a robe and wizard hat back in the day.