In america which lives and breathes the imperial system and measures stuff in fractions of inches.
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Privacy is so GenX
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I think a lot of it is just that a majority of people would sooner off themselves than actually thing about anything, including computers.
Nope. Or maybe wrong with a single grain of not wrong. The reasons computers didn’t catch on to the general public here are many but 90s phones wasn’t it. 90s phones here could text & some had cameras but the uptake of anything resembling internet was minor and minimal.
I wonder if that level three is measuring what happened to be taught to certain people here or what. It sure doesn’t match my experience.
For some others it’s about jeremiad blog posts
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- So first you need to somehow obtain all of John Smith’s email addresses (home, work, the one he uses to argue with weirdos on the internet, the one he uses to sign up for porn, etc.). You could perhaps find out if you can hack into his home PC, work PC, cellphone, tablet, etc. and set up keyloggers or rootkits on each of them. (Assuming all devices that he used last month are still in play and he continues using the same addresses; if he tossed a burner last week, you’re out of luck.)
- Then, knowing where he has email accounts, you need to hack each of those email servers (which probably have quite different architecture and software) and/or infiltrate each of the organizations in order to gain access to all of the emails that he sent.
- Having leeched copies of the entire corpus of sent emails from his multiple accounts, you now need to analyze each message to determine to what degree it is related to sustainability. If he only sent a few, you might be able to read through them, but if he is prolific, you’ll need to hire a team of people or program an AI to do heuristic analysis and rank each email for its relevance to the concept of sustainability.
- But wait, we’re ahead of ourselves. First you need to establish the heuristics to determine whether text should be considered ‘about sustainability’. Perhaps if it contains words like ‘carbon’, ‘solar’, etc. But watch out for emails about his new carbon-fiber jet-ski, or how much he liked the movie Solarbabies.
- Then you’ll need to do a statistical analysis of the weighted heuristic ratings to determine where to set the breakpoint for inclusion (if it is 56% likely to be related to sustainability, do you include that in the count?). Or determine to use some sort of heuristically-weighted average to calculate the percentage (like, this message counts as 0.42 email).
- Then it’s just a simple dual summation and division.
How can that be a ‘level three’ task? It’s so simple!
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Nice. No condemnation of the ‘average user’… instead, copious, detailed, derisive analysis of the insider assumptions implicit in critiques of said ‘average user’.
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Or they could just have simplified by giving you a fake email account and telling you that every email about sustainability contains that or a related word in its title. Calculate as a percentage of the whole. (In this case, John Smith is an employee in your company and you’re only interested in emails sent from his company address).
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I have been known to grep my mbox files here on linux but most users are on webmail or outlook these days so I doubt grep would be of any immediate use.
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I would like to have seen the results of this study done three months before, and three months after, Microsoft changed the Office interface in Office 2007.
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Except that amazement is not equivalent to blame, and people who are clueless still have a right to not be victimized. What does the analogy have to do with anything?
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False equivalency
The study was about using computers, not understanding how they work. Over 99% of people probably couldn’t make Linux From Scratch, but that isn’t what Level 3 skills are.
from the article
Level 3 = 5% of Adult Population
This is what this most-skilled group of people can do: “At this level, tasks typically require the use of both generic and more specific technology applications. Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit. There are typically high monitoring demands. Unexpected outcomes and impasses are likely to occur. The task may require evaluating the relevance and reliability of information in order to discard distractors. Integration and inferential reasoning may be needed to a large extent.”
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As one of the earliest Millennials (or one of the very last of Gen-X depending on how you measure it) I can confirm this. My computer classes at secondary school were boring and hopeless. On a very good day you might have a brief look at how to do level two skills but most of it was crap.
Any attempt to change this was usually met with parents concerned that their children wouldn’t understand it and they didn’t need the skills anyway (probably a more accurate description of the parent than the child). This is despite the school teaching multiple classes at once which were split into different rooms by ability, each with their own teacher.
Any level 3 skills I have are self taught or learned at FE college.
Knowing just enough to cause chaos and damage isn’t a complement.
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Recovering ex-high school teacher here. I doubt very much time is a factor. If it were, we’d be done by now. Remember Gen X were once the kids who knew more about computers than their parents, at least according to popular media.
And thanks to that popular media, a disturbingly high percentage of kids assume they must know more than their teachers, even with evidence to the contrary in front of their faces. I used to show kids the server log entries when they were getting banned for breaking the network access rules, and they honestly thought repeating “I didn’t do it” was a legit rebuttal. Then their parents would be all “are you saying my kid is lying?” because they weren’t any better informed.
And then I would get to give a mini-lesson on how the server logs user actions, which of course would just make the kid and the parents double down, because now they know they’ve been caught out. (Just like with politics!).
So no, I don’t think it has anything to do with time or age. I do think large swaths of people have learned remaining ignorant has short-term benefits, and they can’t be arsed to worry about the long-term detriments.
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I know what you’re saying, but I think it’s more a case of Kids will be Kids and try to get out of anything, and parents thinking their offspring can go no wrong. When people enter the workforce, that’s when IT literacy becomes more important. I’m sure many people would be able to use a computer quite well if they could actually take the time and figure out the problem first, and how it applies to the tools.
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A right, perhaps. An expectation, certainly not.
I’m not sure it does though. Ageism interferes. I’ve seen younger workers who are next to useless with computers (whatever their other skills may be) get lauded for being “digital natives” while older people get to be terrified about losing their jobs, even though they’re getting the bulk of the work done. And yeah, I’ve also seen older workers fly by learning opportunity after learning opportunity because “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” or some such garbage.
Bottom line is age – and time – have nothing to do with it. Attitude and culture do.
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The level 3 skills seem to be mostly general problem defining and problem solving skills, which would have been required equally as well in the slide rule era or the abacus era.
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I’m a late GenXer, and I first used a computer in college. For me, I already had the problem solving ability, but lagged behind in general computer use skills, mostly relating to the UI. I knew what to do, but not how to do it.
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This.
I’m firmly GenX and part of my job requires me to be the point person for tech issues. Be they a .ppt not formating properly or replacing the fuser on the copier or trouble shooting a projector. Its all me. None of the people I support will learn even the most basic of things because they’re “old”. And yet, most of my undergrads don’t understand the difference between Pages & Word and none of them can troubleshoot anything, they don’t even realize that things can be fixed, they just assume we replace everything.
Honestly, its a really weird place to live. I see the older gens not understanding tech & software “No, Outlook is not your browser” but I see the younger gens ALSO not understanding tech & software. “No, we cannot text you your schedule you need to use your email account!” - it all ends up with me wanting to go live in a cabin in the woods.
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…as long as there’s wifi, right? 
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