My daughter decided last week that she should put a PIN on her phone. 2 hours later, she couldn’t unlock the phone even though she was certain she was inputting the correct PIN. We ended up having to do a factory reset. She’s 18!
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Oh hell I am 48 and prone to do that.
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I’d never argue that computers should replace physical instruments or art supplies. I believe we are in agreement here.
Regarding keyboards, there have been some studies that specifically look at typing speeds with younger students on both physical and virtual keyboards. They indicate there is virtually no difference in typing speeds for these students. (The study you cite has an average age of 28.)
http://www.bradycline.com/2013/in/ipad-typing/
Indeed, other studies have shown the error rates with virtual keyboards to be lower as well (http://usabilitynews.org/keyboard-performance-ipad-versus-netbook/). It’s worth noting that the average age in both of these studies was lower than the one you cite- slightly in the later, and very much so in the first).
To that end, I stick with my original assertion: that younger typists with less years of experience on physical keyboards are less encumbered by virtual keyboards. And, in either case, I believe that the rate of typing is (essentially) never the bottleneck for the speed with which students work- it’s the thinking that slows them down.
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Yeah, this. The EFF “recommended” settings are more like a punishment for the user.
It is amazing how much people will “type” on a tablet or smartphone. Not as much as a real keyboard, obviously, but way more than you’d expect. Oh XKCD 386, how right you have been proven in so many aspects of our lives.
Does it work on every device I own? Oh, I have to set it up manually everywhere? Game over. Proposing these manually installed password tools as a solution is a joke. Nobody except the 1%, hell, the one-millionth-of-one-percent, are using them.
I agree completely that passwords are the problem, but that ain’t the solution. Adding more manual work to the user’s plate is quite the opposite of a solution.
(also @albill, you might consider replying to multiple people in the same reply, as I have above, rather than 3 distinct replies to one person, with quote, each … less metadata to wade through for the same amount of content.)
That looks like work!
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I only realized a week ago that if you have an open reply, you can select text on different things, choose the “quote,” and it will append to your reply. I’d complain about the UX design but you’d probably kill me.
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Work for you > work you ask every single person reading to do 
As Spock once said, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.
If you have ideas of how to make quoting more discoverable, definitely open a meta topic here about it. There’s nothing wrong with 3 sequential replies, we support it, but I hope users who have been around a while can reply super-awesomely.
Anyway back on topic.
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I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not.
This is: You mean my car doesn’t drive itself and I’ll have to learn how to operate “heavy machinery”! Then, every day I drive it I’ll be hurtling down the road in a death machine where if I screw up or even if I do everything right and someone else screws up I could be one of the 3,287(ish) people who die every day?! Game over man, we’re doomed. We’re fscked even.
Srsly, if anyone can drive a car or heck, play candy angry birds, then they can install an app on their smartphone & a plugin in their browser.
…and to answer your questions: yes (if you use big player devices) & you setup your account once on any device and any subsequent device links to it - but if you consider installing an app and logging in arduous, I don’t know what to tell you.
Montessori for the win! My daughter didn’t have a computer in her classroom until this year (she’s in 7th). they had one they could access in the library prior to that for research, but especially in primary classroom, the focus is on hands on learning, getting a grip on empathy and practical life skills, and learning to become part of a community. They still do tons of experiments, they have a reading group, they do math/science together, and have personal reflection time that where they are not allowed to be on computers. They pretty much only use the computers for some research and for doing their language work.
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I’m not entirely against have a net enabled computer in classrooms at least for older kids, in part because it’s part of the real world that they are going to be engaging with at some point. But also because there are decent research materials online that they may not have access to in their libraries. This is especially important if they go to a small school (like my kid does) with a small library. Learning to code is important and should be standard part of the curriculum (starting in middle school perhaps), but it’s not the only thing a computer can do for you.
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Isn’t this part of the problem? Whenever you bring up issues of privacy and security online, most people just shrug it off or think you’re a bit of a tin-foil-hat type. I think most people don’t think it matters if Google, facebook, the school district, whoever are tracking you. They don’t care as long as their internet experience is smooth and easy to deal with.
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I think the pi and similar devices are useful for teaching kids what is valuable about computing, i.e. spotting problems, analysis, evaluating solutions, computational logic, signal processing …
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If the safe behavior isn’t built in and default, if it takes substantial extra effort, then it’s not going to work. I mean it will work for the one millionth of one percent who can be bothered to go through the extra effort, so… yay? Problem solved?
I’d rather focus on fixing the defaults than “go install this special complicated thing and make sure it works everywhere you touch a computer”. Good luck with that.
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On a related matter, a friend this morning on FB mentioned how she sang a song last night and now her phone was sending her ads for that album. It turns out a number of people were mentioning similar things and it turns out they’re all using the FB app.
I mentioned they should dump the app and just use the browser on their phones to get to FB, which is pretty much what the app is doing anyway and they all basically said that seemed like too much work in comparison and that in the end the fact that their phone’s microphone was listening to them and creating ad content for them wasn’t that big of a deal and oh well.
And so, this is how it ends. Privacy by typing things into a browser bar or using a bookmark instead? Not when we can just push a button! So it’s not even substantial extra effort, it’s any extra effort.
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