[WEB4LIB] Re: "Generation shifts" and technology

[Harold Bakker]

Fiona,

You raise some interesting points.

At 15:17 -0800 05-01-2005, Fiona Bradley wrote:
> The problem is then that ensuing assumptions are made that young people
> don't need training on technology because "they already know it all" and
> so technology just remains a gadget - not a tool to assist in achieving
> something else. And this is starting to lead to problems in the
> workplace.

I have been working in higher education in the Netherlands since late 1997
and in that time I have seen a heavy shift; from learning students how to
use computers to how to use programs. In the olden days (ha, this is only 7
years ago!) it was not uncommon for me to learn students how to work with a
mouse. Nowadays they almost all know how to do that, so we can focus more
on teaching them how to use the tools at their disposal, especially online
databases, catalogs etc. We can now also focus on teaching students how to
assess the retrieved information so they can weed out the irrelevant (an
essential skill in the age of Google).

> There have been recent discussions on Slashdot that the sophistication
> of software is actually hurting younger people, especially budding
> programmers, because unlike being able to build applications from the
> ground up in a simplified language in the past, tools today are so
> over-the-top in features that just learning how to use the software,
> before you even think about learning programming is too overwhelming.
> Link:
> http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/1641207&tid=156&tid=185&tid=4

I must admit I have not read the hundreds of messages there but in my
opinion as a webmaster there are now newer languages that are perhaps more
useful to learn. Yes I learned some basic Basic on the Commodore when I was
young, but if I were young now I'd probably start with something like HTML
and work my way up to PHP. Add in a database like MySQL and you're hard at
work on your first web application. This development can be done in just
about any text-editor that doesn't mangle your input (*cough* M$ Word
*cough*).
In fact this describes exactly what I did in the late '90's.
-- 
Harold Bakker
webmaster FSAO, HvU
+31 (0)30-2513539 (home)
+31 (0)30-2529877 (work)
http://www.haroldbakker.com
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