What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can’t wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
I remember being flabbergasted the first time I had to explain this to some of the boomer teachers and admin staff with my part time college job. The secretary had no idea how to find documents outside of word recent list.
The idea that young people are even worse than that secretary is scary.
Yeah, the only zoomers who really understand computers beyond the surface are gamers, especially ones who played stuff like modded minecraft before there were dedicated launchers for it
And on Nero fiddled while Rome burned… (aaand now I feel like I need to start appending eli5-esque, super simplistic breakdowns of what I’m saying at the end of my comments…)
Though, I gotta say, this does explain why I’ve noticed such a seeming up-tick in people staring just absolutely nonsensical arguments with me on here because they can’t seem to understand that I’m making points im favor of their argument to begin with lol
Within the last 24hrs, I had an argument with someone who… proposed concept A as a solution, then proposed concept B, which explicitly discarded and contradicted concept A, as another solution… just back to back, mere sentences apart.
I pointed out that not only would neither A nor B work as a solution… but that A and B also contradicted each other, and that this person just isn’t eve making sense, because they do not seem to even be aware that A and B contradict each other.
This person replies with a giant rant about ‘how could you even think that they contradict each other unless you read one sentence after another and think of it all at the same time?’
I really wish I was making this up.
This person did not comprehend the idea that… a paragraph of sentences build off of and relate and refer to each other, and are more that just a list of completely isolated bullet points.
They actually could not grasp the concept … that a concept may take more than a single sentence to convey.
Though, I gotta say, this does explain why I’ve noticed such a seeming up-tick in people staring just absolutely nonsensical arguments with me on here because they can’t seem to understand that I’m making points im favor of their argument to begin with lol
Do you have to read for fun for it to be functional literacy?
It seems to me that kids are perfectly literate. They start texting, instant messaging, commenting on things, etc. from a very young age. That’s all reading and writing, which is all literacy. Do you have a source for this 2nd grade reading level? Because, although the slang used by the youngs is annoying, it certainly doesn’t seem 2nd grade level to me.
Kind of amazing that I have to tell you that in a discussion about literacy.
The ‘reads for fun’ and ‘lowest category of reading/writing ability’ are seperate statistics, they are not dependent on or derived from each other, they were measured separately… they are just the two the article focused on, out of a larger report, which is linked in the article, which you can read in its entirety if you want to.
I am astounded that, in a discussion about literacy, I provided the source, and you somehow did not read it or investigate it at all, and am now asking me for the source.
Fact-checking and basic research skills are part of intermediate literacy levels, which you apparently do not possess, so I suppose that is why everything seems fine to you.
If I pick up a notebook and scribble something in it, the next time I pick up the notebook whatever I scribbled will still be there. It’s very unusual that when a computer shuts down the RAM is cleared. Making it worse for intuitive understanding, a lot of apps are constantly saving and restoring state without any user intervention, making it seem like a notebook that just keeps state whenever you use it.
The implementation detail that RAM is very fast but doesn’t store state but flash is slightly slower but does store state is something that you have to learn. To actually understand why RAM doesn’t store state you need to understand how it’s built, and how capacitors can store charge for a short time but need to be refreshed. Why flash / electrically erasable memory works the way it does is yet another university-level class.
Add to that that the concept of a “file” and a “filesystem” are not obvious at all. The concept got its name from actual paper documents being strung together with wire. The name was used in early computer work as a skeuomorph to make understanding computer storage easier. This data on disk is grouped together in a “file” just like you’d group together pages of text into a “file”.
If we were designing things from scratch today, the concept of a “file” or “filesystem” would probably not exist. We’d probably just go with a key-value store on top of some kind of B-tree stuff directly on the flash memory.
The only reason older people learned these things is that they dealt with computers that were not as user friendly. If someone is young enough, they probably experienced turning off a computer and losing all their stuff because they hadn’t saved. And, saving was cumbersome for a long time. You had to actually decide what filename to use and where on the filesystem to store something. One of the biggest pushes in computing in the last couple of decades is to make all that easier, to make it so that files are saved automatically and you never have to see a file browser or a filename. Sure, the underlying system is still all files, directories, etc. But, that’s just not something that people encounter anymore.
What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can’t wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
I remember being flabbergasted the first time I had to explain this to some of the boomer teachers and admin staff with my part time college job. The secretary had no idea how to find documents outside of word recent list.
The idea that young people are even worse than that secretary is scary.
I had the exact observation. It’s crazy
Yeah, the only zoomers who really understand computers beyond the surface are gamers, especially ones who played stuff like modded minecraft before there were dedicated launchers for it
I mean… entirely seriously:
A large percentage of them are also functionally illiterate.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-parents-children-reading-literacy-crisis-2081875
The % of kids that ‘read for fun everyday’ has dropped from 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023.
Functionally illiterate reading levels of the whole US population?
19% in 2017.
28% in 2023.
Again, for emphasis: 28% of all Americans are functionally illiterate.
They can’t read beyond a ‘Hop on Pop’ level.
Nearly a third of the US population is at a 2nd grade reading level.
And that near 10% increase in 6 years… thats 6 years of Zoomers graduating high school and becoming adults.
… Only gonna be worse for Gen Alpha.
And on Nero fiddled while Rome burned… (aaand now I feel like I need to start appending eli5-esque, super simplistic breakdowns of what I’m saying at the end of my comments…)
Though, I gotta say, this does explain why I’ve noticed such a seeming up-tick in people staring just absolutely nonsensical arguments with me on here because they can’t seem to understand that I’m making points im favor of their argument to begin with lol
Within the last 24hrs, I had an argument with someone who… proposed concept A as a solution, then proposed concept B, which explicitly discarded and contradicted concept A, as another solution… just back to back, mere sentences apart.
I pointed out that not only would neither A nor B work as a solution… but that A and B also contradicted each other, and that this person just isn’t eve making sense, because they do not seem to even be aware that A and B contradict each other.
This person replies with a giant rant about ‘how could you even think that they contradict each other unless you read one sentence after another and think of it all at the same time?’
I really wish I was making this up.
This person did not comprehend the idea that… a paragraph of sentences build off of and relate and refer to each other, and are more that just a list of completely isolated bullet points.
They actually could not grasp the concept … that a concept may take more than a single sentence to convey.
Reddit for the past 5 years
Do you have to read for fun for it to be functional literacy?
It seems to me that kids are perfectly literate. They start texting, instant messaging, commenting on things, etc. from a very young age. That’s all reading and writing, which is all literacy. Do you have a source for this 2nd grade reading level? Because, although the slang used by the youngs is annoying, it certainly doesn’t seem 2nd grade level to me.
Read the link I provided.
That is the source, that is why I provided it.
Kind of amazing that I have to tell you that in a discussion about literacy.
The ‘reads for fun’ and ‘lowest category of reading/writing ability’ are seperate statistics, they are not dependent on or derived from each other, they were measured separately… they are just the two the article focused on, out of a larger report, which is linked in the article, which you can read in its entirety if you want to.
I am astounded that, in a discussion about literacy, I provided the source, and you somehow did not read it or investigate it at all, and am now asking me for the source.
Fact-checking and basic research skills are part of intermediate literacy levels, which you apparently do not possess, so I suppose that is why everything seems fine to you.
To be fair, it’s not an obvious concept.
If I pick up a notebook and scribble something in it, the next time I pick up the notebook whatever I scribbled will still be there. It’s very unusual that when a computer shuts down the RAM is cleared. Making it worse for intuitive understanding, a lot of apps are constantly saving and restoring state without any user intervention, making it seem like a notebook that just keeps state whenever you use it.
The implementation detail that RAM is very fast but doesn’t store state but flash is slightly slower but does store state is something that you have to learn. To actually understand why RAM doesn’t store state you need to understand how it’s built, and how capacitors can store charge for a short time but need to be refreshed. Why flash / electrically erasable memory works the way it does is yet another university-level class.
Add to that that the concept of a “file” and a “filesystem” are not obvious at all. The concept got its name from actual paper documents being strung together with wire. The name was used in early computer work as a skeuomorph to make understanding computer storage easier. This data on disk is grouped together in a “file” just like you’d group together pages of text into a “file”.
If we were designing things from scratch today, the concept of a “file” or “filesystem” would probably not exist. We’d probably just go with a key-value store on top of some kind of B-tree stuff directly on the flash memory.
The only reason older people learned these things is that they dealt with computers that were not as user friendly. If someone is young enough, they probably experienced turning off a computer and losing all their stuff because they hadn’t saved. And, saving was cumbersome for a long time. You had to actually decide what filename to use and where on the filesystem to store something. One of the biggest pushes in computing in the last couple of decades is to make all that easier, to make it so that files are saved automatically and you never have to see a file browser or a filename. Sure, the underlying system is still all files, directories, etc. But, that’s just not something that people encounter anymore.