Kids Can't Use Computers... and This is Why It Should Worry You (2013)
owl writes:
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
The phone rang through to my workroom. It was one of the school receptionists explaining that there was a visitor downstairs that needed to get on the school's WiFi network. iPad in hand I trotted on down to the reception to see a young twenty-something sitting on a chair with a MacBook on her knee.
I smiled and introduced myself as I sat down beside her. She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it. I've been mistaken for a technician enough times to recognise the expression.
'I'll need to be quick. I've got a lesson to teach in 5 minutes,' I said. 'You teach?'
'That's my job, I just happen to manage the network team as well.'
She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She'd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can't display her PowerPoint on the IWB she'll need a technician, and so she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with.
[Ed. note: Now that we're 10+ years on from this story where the "kids" in the article are now working professionals, how do you think this has stood up? I have a friend that teaches 101-level programming and he says even the concept of files and directories are foreign and confusing to students because apps just save files somewhere and pulls them when they need them. --hubie]
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