This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use “recent”), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don’t know typing.
Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.
I don’t mean “programming,” per se, and I don’t mean “scripting,” per se, and I don’t mean “piping together commands on a text command-line,” per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and (c) instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.
A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they’ve never used before and (eventually) figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting their brain off and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.
This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use “recent”), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don’t know typing.
Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.
I don’t mean “programming,” per se, and I don’t mean “scripting,” per se, and I don’t mean “piping together commands on a text command-line,” per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and (c) instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.
A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they’ve never used before and (eventually) figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting their brain off and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.