Schools should be teaching kids how to use the internet.

I dont really know what they are teaching kids these days in school but i remember my experience somewhat. They taught us basically what email was and a very watered down explanation of how it worked, and about the different top domain names and what they are supposed to be used for but it was a very brief lesson and if you missed that day you just missed out.

This was in elementary school i think and by the time high school came the internet was much more widely used in the classroom but actually teaching us about the internet and how it worked not so much. They did teach us how to research things on the internet just like they taught us how to research things in a library but it seemed like after a certain point they wanted to start censoring the internet .. and no way they're gonna actually teach us how that amazing technology really works because then we'll know enough to be able to break the censorship

This is 2014 .. computers and the internet is DEFINITELY something that the current generation of kids need to have at least a basic understanding of !! Knowledge is power, and this is the information age.. the IT age.

But based on my limited interaction w/ the younger generation (teenagers) .. it seems they really don't, or they must not be paying attention at all. And some are even worse off than you'd expect because they grew up with it but never understood it where the generation before them had to understand it to get it to work back in the dot matrix printer era.

Apparently the president would agree with me, here is a link to an interesting article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...ing-kids-how-to-use-the-internet-well/283807/

i've felt this way for so long, that shielding kids from the internet doesnt help .. how the fuck else are you supposed to learn, and what do you expect to happen when the shield is gone ??

 

They do. It's in pretty much every first-world curriculum.

 

I remember them teaching us that in the late 90s. Public middle school

 

My computer classes in high school were extremely informative, we would have huge 600 page books that were about programming and you had to go through every step then be signed off on it, pretty good classes that I had at least but I am in the 3rd richest county in the U.S. so I can see shitty schools having a hard time keeping up

 

Yea I assumed they def teach kids those things pretty or fairly well.

 

Not really, next time you are out and about and see a 5 yr old, watch what they are doing, its either an ipad, iphone or android, theres an app for everything, they dont live on the internet like everyone older, and everythings plug and play nowadays.

Think about it, theres no need to know about html, css, sql, scripting languages or higher level languages, no need to even have to work how to use programs as there is either an app or simpler version online that pre-empts every mistake, rarely do you ever have to know how to configure a printer, you dont even have to remember the sequences for smilies.

You dont need to know as much about the under the hood stuff as you used to

 

In this 24/7 W.W. World of IT interaction, dependency and indeed Danger - it would seem foolhardy not to prepare our youth with a measured a structured level of Education

 

To some extent this is probably true.

But under the hood apps are all Java sql and css. If you want to do more than just consume content it will be nessecary to learn more. There are also hiden costs. Not knowing cars means you'll have to pay a mechanic. Not knowing computers not only comes at the risk of having to pay for repair. There are potentially serious privacy implications.

 

There has been a bit of hubbub in business news this week cos Chinas Oneplus are about to flood the market with smartphones that have 2.5 gig processors and 13MP cameras all for 300 USD, so 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of their main rivals, Samsung and Apple, not really trying to spam for Oneplus, my point is its the next big thing, where prices were going to head, and at that price you arent really going to bother with repair, just throw it out, get a new one

My first time at Uni, I did IT, was all pretty much useless, almost all under the hood jobs in the west got wiped out by India, China and Korea. Remaing IT jobs in the west are most service orientated or engineering related

Plus any degree is subject to normal forces of supply and demand, everyone thinks IT means money, so too many people do it and theres an oversupply when they graduate, every company outsources the under the hood stuff to India, leaving jobs where one spends most of their time kissing clients arses or explaining shit to people, taken up by those that also did some vocational, training or psych degree, or high end engineering where the jobs are taken by those that also did an engineering degree.

I wouldnt advise any kid in the US, UK or Aus to bother with just IT. When it comes to thinking about what they want to do with their life, whats going to make them a bundle of money, no one really thinks of things like pathology or a dozen other obscure science degrees, cos no one else eally thinks about that so their is an undersupply and a lot of them do end up earning better money and have more job prospects.

The reality is very different to what people assume

As for privacy issues, what do people need to know? Dont open attachments, use a credit card with a low balance for online, dont post your date of birth or your first pets name anywhere, a total of 1 hrs learning.

Whats seems to be most important nowadays is handing them and ipad when they're in the pram at 2 yrs old, they'll be tech savvy by the time they get to kindergarten, and as if any grade school teacher is going to be able to keep up with them

Its different nowadays to even those here that where in their teens a decade ago

 

my school taught me plenty about using the internet. not directly of course, but that damn bess dog taught me how to get around internet blockers by searching for porn in spanish. and using AIM in typing class was how i learned to troll.

 

we used to fight over the green screens or orange screens

i think they were ICONs and PETs

 

lol i remember the green screens, tho i was quite young. programs were loaded in the command line tho programs themselves might have a very simple textual interface that included some cool ASCII artwork, there were a few games that had very very simple 2D graphics.

the first family computer we had the monitor displayed blue, used the 5 1/4" floppies that had a hole in the middle and had a dot matrix printer. each program you wanted to load was on its own disk, as well as to boot the thing required another disk. i wish i remember what kind of system that actually was.

then the school upgraded to Macs, with an actual GUI and window system .. i still remember the Mario typing game

 

I remember when Napster first came out, that was the first time I actually cared about the internet before that I thought it was kinda dumb

 

I just regret not being a little bit older when the internet really got popular, I mean i'm supposed to be a whiz kid but idk if i'll ever catch up to some of those older geeks in knowledge

 

Kids need to be taught how to use the internet? It's fairly simple. Actually, my 2 year old learned how to navigate the internet on her own... It seems kids are more tech savvy now.

I only remember playing Oregon trail in grade school.

 

But I guess the article talks about social media being a distraction and causing kids not to utilize the internet well.. I think it's the parents jobs to control social media, shouldn't really be up to school.

 

heh, i wish parents wouldn't try to censor their kids' internet

gee, fuckin let the kids learn some shit dammit ! let them get on IRC and learn a little. Too many parents just wanna block chat rooms and stuff.

they say kids have to learn about computers and electronics fairly early in life .. if they don't pick up on it early its unlikely they'll be able to really get it later on. of course with a basic foundation of tech knowledge they can build on that the rest of their life.

 

I wasn't talking about censorship. The article says social media is distracting and I was agreeing. If kids are supposed to be doing homework and using the internet to research then they shouldn't be wasting time on facebook.

 

^i agree that facebook is a waste of time .. not much to learn there

i remember the early facebook you could slip code into the page but theyve fixed pretty much every possible way this can be done now ...

 

Yeah, I think facebook is a waste of time and too much drama... I guess you could say the same about hipforums but while there is drama here there's still a lot of learning going on. You get to read points of views from different people and have discussions.