[HN Gopher] When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of ...
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When swiping supplants scissors: The hidden cost of touchscreens
Author : SLHamlet
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-07-24 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (caseorganic.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (caseorganic.medium.com)
| Proofread0592 wrote:
| > "It's like they've never seen a block," says Hornbeck, an
| instructional coach at Beverly City Public Schools in New Jersey,
| describing how kids fumble when asked to stack just three blocks.
| "The things they do with the block when you've just shown them
| what to do is boggling."
|
| Whenever I see quotes about "kids these days can't do X", I'm
| always skeptical.
|
| You remember the kids in your class that were just absolutely,
| indefensibly stupid? These quotes are probably talking about
| those specific kids. I seriously doubt out of a class of 30 kids,
| all 30 of them couldn't stack the blocks. It was probably the 5
| kids in the class that are just stupid, and every class
| throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and
| always will.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Maybe the proportion of "stupid" kids is increasing due to
| phone use altering cognitive development?
|
| I don't know if that's true or not but it is worth thinking
| about.
|
| Especially since apparently Big Tech executives and top
| engineers are very strict regarding technology use in their
| children. And very strict regarding screen time.
|
| Reminiscent of how tobacco executives would not let their kids
| smoke while suppressing data regarding lung cancer.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| > every class throughout the history of time has had those
| stupid kids, and always will
|
| Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn.
| And current technology could make this time longer.
| somat wrote:
| > Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to
| learn.
|
| Isn't that the definition of stupid, someone who needs more
| time than average to learn. While smart would be someone who
| needs less time than average to learn.
| Terr_ wrote:
| That seems a little reductive to me, since "needs more
| time" could mean many different things, ex:
|
| 1. (Overall rate) From the same starting-point, this child
| will always require 2x the time/effort to learn than
| expected.
|
| 2. (Overall offset) This child's thresholds for becoming
| able to learn many skills at the normal rate tends to be 6
| months later than expected.
|
| 3. (Specific rates) For a particular task this child
| learned slowly no matter how old they were.
|
| 4. (Specific offsets) For a particular task this child
| learned slowly, but when stopped trying and revisited it X
| months later they had no problems.
|
| Of those, it sounds like you're assuming the harshest,
| first version.
|
| I'm no child developmental psychologist, but I'd wager that
| versions 2,3,4 are more frequent than most people would
| assume, since they take more work to distinguish and the
| universe tends to be messy.
| dguest wrote:
| For better or worse they did actually cite statistics:
|
| > 77 percent of educators reported young students having
| greater difficulties handling pencils, pens, and scissors. In
| comparison, 69 percent noted increased struggles with tying
| shoes compared to five years ago.
|
| But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from
| questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of
| people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has
| remained unchanged in the last 30 years.
|
| That said, I wouldn't doubt the claim, only the methodology.
| drdec wrote:
| > But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from
| questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of
| people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has
| remained unchanged in the last 30 years.
|
| Oh no, there are for sure more people now who think things
| are worse vs 5 years ago than there were 5 years ago.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well, there's a huge difference between having 5/30 kids being
| intensely stupid vs. 6/30 in the average kindergarten. That is
| catastrophically bad.
| everdrive wrote:
| Last 20 years or so seem to be a track record of people
| coordinating to make voluntarily bad decisions with technology:
|
| - social media
|
| - chromebooks in school
|
| - smartphones
|
| - the attention economy
|
| - llms
|
| - etc
|
| None of these were inevitable, and in principle all are
| reversible. But, we're all trapped by the tyranny of the
| majority. It feels like it will continue to get worse.
| titzer wrote:
| It all comes back to growthism. When you're a MegaCorp, you
| can't make 20% more YoY revenue growth by making better
| products, charging more, or cutting costs. The only option is
| to get hundreds of millions or billions of new eyeballs with
| billions of hours of attention. You gotta keep them off other
| platforms. You gotta keep them unable to do anything but stare
| at the screen and consume.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Chromebooks in school seemed like a great idea before attention
| economy destroyed society. If your kid is spending their time
| playing with legos, drawing, etc, and for homework they use the
| chromebook, which develops rudimentary computer skills and
| vastly reduces teacher workload, then it's great. Different
| picture when their past time is tiktok, roblox, etc
|
| Inb4 "I grew up gaming all day and I'm fine" millenials: the
| social fabric of your life didn't depend on the games, they
| were games. Social media is vastly different. (also you
| arguably could have done better with better activities)
| Veen wrote:
| That's what happens when lots of very smart people dedicate
| their working lives to devising schemes and systems that push
| people towards making bad decisions. There's a lot of money to
| be made influencing people to act against their own best
| interests.
| pempem wrote:
| Is it the tyranny of the majority? Is the majority really
| pushing for chromebooks or to get work emails at 9pm or the
| LLMs which -we breathlessly read every day for 4 years now-
| will make people jobless?
|
| There are certainly conveniences - world changing improvements
| - but I dont think the majority ever defined or was asked what
| they were willing to trade. I dont think EULAs and buried opt-
| outs or binding arbitration across a product portfolio was what
| they had in mind.
| IcyWindows wrote:
| Objectively, how important are those lost skills?
|
| I don't disagree that fine motor skills are important, but I
| don't know for sure if they are still needed like they used to
| be.
|
| Skills needed for daily life change as culture develops.
| goda90 wrote:
| Fine motor skills in a broad sense are building block skills,
| just like reading(which is also declining). It opens up the
| opportunity for learning more complex skills. Unless we want to
| go the route of being 100% automated pampering content
| consumers like in Wall-E, we should keep up the baseline
| skills.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I take a bit of an orthogonal view myself: the skills
| themselves don't matter nearly as much as the resilience
| necessary to build them. Consumer tech focuses a lot on low-
| friction interactions that abstract away challenges. Sometimes
| those challenges are pointless, but sometimes they're not. If
| you take away all the challenges everywhere, you end up with
| someone who's fragile to the tiniest random bumps in life.
|
| I think this is true the value of extracurricular activities
| like sports and art. There's no way to shortcut those skills.
| The struggle is part of the experience. Every violin player
| will sound like a dying cat their first year. Every would-be
| baseball pitcher will make awful throws when playing catch with
| their dad. But they get better with time, and in the process
| internalize that they're capable of doing so.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you want to just extirpate things like music and art then
| yeah, it's fine if nobody knows how to use their fingers.
| jabjq wrote:
| Those who need fine motor skills can still learn them.
| proteal wrote:
| It's kinda like why they make compsci majors take a history
| class - the actual knowledge may not be particularly useful
| unto itself, but learning that information/skill tickles a part
| of the brain you dont normally use. So that later, when you
| need to use your whole brain to solve some problem, all parts
| of it are strong.
|
| So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they
| represent "meta skills" that we want kids to develop when they
| are most apt to learn.
|
| Ultimately, I think it's a big TBD - a child's mind innately
| wants to learn, it's just unclear what kids are learning when
| exposed to so much tech early on and that's what has teachers
| worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society
| won't really know until the kids are old enough to tell us
| firsthand.
| MattGrommes wrote:
| With my kids, one of my main priorities was just making sure
| they knew that things were available and possible. Even if they
| never got into drawing or painting, we did them to show that
| painting or woodworking weren't some mysterious process. If you
| never do things with your hands, you won't have those potential
| areas of expression available to you.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Chesterton's Fence always bothered me as an argument unto itself.
| Without providing (or attempting to a provide) a test for the
| destruction of the fence along with the argument, you are
| performing a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. When you do
| this you are shifting a potentially infinite burden of proof to
| the other side. It's Chesterton's _fence_ not Chesterton 's
| _infinite fucking barrier_.
| privatelypublic wrote:
| Theres a reason it's called chesterson's fence. Not
| chesterson's law.
|
| It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at things
| as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're right.
|
| I've never seen somebody propose it as a formal debate concept-
| but rather a perspective in which to enter the debate.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| > It's a teaching prop that (imho) tells people to look at
| things as if they are wrong- rather than assume they're
| right.
|
| I think you have that exactly backwards. Meaning... the
| "prop" would be to assume the fence-builder was right, not
| wrong, and you need to find the why before you can remove the
| obviously-dumb-thing-with-visible-no-purpose.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I'm sure you're beyond me here, but not quite following. He's
| not using the argument himself he's saying this is a situation
| in which people are removing "the fence" (replacing scissor-
| and-crayon time with tablets) without asking why it was there
| (establishing fine motor skills).
|
| It's clouded here because the article knows why the fence is
| there. Specifically - the fence (scissors, drawing, coloring)
| are tools we use in primary school to strengthen the childrens'
| hands and strengthen their fine motor skills.
|
| When they're older and attempting to write a long essay they
| don't get muscle cramps and break their concentration. Instead,
| they... simply write. We don't hand-write anymore but we also
| no longer have the
| notatoad wrote:
| yeah, chesterton's fence has fully crossed the line from useful
| rhetorical tool to frequently mis-applied aphorism.
|
| don't remove the fence until you know why it was built is a
| simple, useful thought experiment. but it doesn't mean "don't
| remove the fence until you know about every single side effect
| that it could possibly have had since it was built, including
| things the builder could never have possibly imagined, and
| fully accounted for the consequences of each of those effects."
|
| if you sell the bull in chesterton's field, then you can tear
| down chesterton's fence. whether or not that lets the coyotes
| access the neighbour's chickens isn't part of the metaphor.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| If you built the fence to contain the bull then clearly you
| have removed the reason. It's not a Chesterton's Fence.
| Chesterton's Fence is about things that have no apparent
| purpose--because an awful lot of such things have a purpose
| that's not obvious.
| ksenzee wrote:
| The quote in the article seems to come from nowhere. It's not
| in the post they link, and Google doesn't find it. I went
| looking because I was uncomfortable with the way Chesterton's
| Fence was being used here: it's not supposed to be "that fence
| is important!" It's supposed to be "that fence _may_ be
| important, and until you know whether it is or not, leave it
| up." I've probably written a lot of code that looks like a
| fence across a road, and I would hate to think everyone I ever
| worked with is leaving it up regardless of whether it's still
| useful.
|
| In this case I happen to agree with the author's premise: it
| seems clear that kids have a developmental need to interact
| with the world physically. But I'm not comfortable with a made-
| up blockquote that slightly twists the meaning of the original
| parable.
|
| ETA: I'm not accusing the author of the Medium article of
| fabricating their quote; their source may have changed in the
| interim. I'm just saying someone made up this story, there's no
| apparent source for it, and it's not a good representation of
| the principle it purportedly explains.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| The author is claiming he knows why the fence was built, but
| now we've torn it down, which is not the normal way of using
| the CF idiom... but... doesn't mean it's not a reasonable
| usage.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I was a teacher, in both Australia and the UK.
|
| The first thing I was told in an educational psychology lecture
| was to never cite any research more than ten years old. (If you
| break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being reinvented over
| and over again.) When I was teaching, half of all teachers left
| the profession within their first five years; I've heard
| anecdotally that it's 80% now. It's not the clever ones who stay.
| There's a strong push (often enforced by professional teaching
| standards) to constantly implement the latest research, which
| means every teacher has to do the new thing, and is discouraged
| from thinking about whether it's all bullshit.
|
| One of the most enduring ideas in educational psychology is the
| stage-based theory of Jean Piaget[0]. Computer use belongs very
| much in 'formal operations', the last stage of the theory,
| because everything that happens in the computer is just an
| abstract representation of what happens in the physical world.
| Progress between stages varies from child to child, but from
| Piaget's observations, it usually happens around the age of 11,
| which is when children transition from primary school to
| secondary school in the Australian and British school systems.
| This is why children struggle to learn, say, algebra, in primary
| school. If you introduce these ideas before children are ready
| for them, they internalise them as social rules in the same way
| as 'raise your hand before speaking in the classroom'. So not
| only does introducing computing too early harm the development of
| other skills, it also teaches a suboptimal approach to computing.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > (If you break this rule, you'll see the same ideas being
| reinvented over and over again.)
|
| I would suppose if you didn't break the rule the same ideas
| would be reinvented over and over again, but you wouldn't see
| it
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Anecdotally, dunno how much I can get behind this. By 11, I'd
| learned to touch type and was building virtual houses using one
| of those consumer CAD programs. My friend was a webmaster and
| ran a small Pokemon forum. Another friend was producing small
| musical albums. I'm sure countless SWEs can tell you about
| their early coding adventures.
|
| The real-world experience came first, of course (a whirlwind
| house hunt that taught me a lot about style and layouts; an
| intense interest in the series; an early mastery of the piano,
| respectively). But, "You're too young," would have represented
| a frustrating impediment to our curiosity and industry. I faced
| that anyway, later on ("We can't afford that," to multiple
| attempts at breaking into CGI), but I know at least the latter
| friend is a prolific musical artist and virtuoso on several
| instruments. And I imagine quite a lot of software wouldn't
| exist, or would be/perform much worse, if the people who made
| it hadn't had early encounters with - in fact, were shaped by -
| computing.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I started computer programming at a similar age, but there's
| a difference between an individual child following their
| passion at the level of their own abilities, and a classroom
| teacher trying to develop abstract thinking in 25 or 30
| children simultaneously.
|
| There was a great paper I read from the 1950s, where the
| researcher simply observed a teacher reading a story and
| asking comprehension questions of the class, who were six
| years old or so. When the teacher asked a question, all the
| children raised their hands, but when a child was nominated
| to answer the question, the children frequently didn't have
| an answer. They were just raising their hands because it was
| the socially desirable thing to do; they just wanted to
| please the teacher. As children grow older, they become more
| skilled in feigning understanding, and even when teachers do
| see through the illusion, they often don't have the time in
| the classroom environment to provide the individual support
| needed to fix the problem.
| domador wrote:
| "The first thing I was told in an educational psychology
| lecture was to never cite any research more than ten years
| old."
|
| Just to confirm, did you really mean to say MORE than ten years
| old or did you mean LESS?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| There's no typo there, what I typed is what we were told.
| There's a genuine belief that research expires after ten
| years in educational psychology (and possibly other human
| sciences). It was a sharp contrast to my major in physics, in
| which the first year was almost exclusively ideas from the
| eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Article on one possible effect of this:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/well/live/surgeons-hobbie...
|
| This sort of thing is one argument for why northern European
| countries still have Sloyd woodworking in schools:
|
| https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
|
| >Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever
| have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your
| hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others.
|
| Similarly, Maria Montessori's instruction method still seems
| valid --- interestingly, the blocks were described by one
| woodworker I knew as quite challenging to make because of the
| solid/density requirement and the overall size of the largest
| block.
|
| That said, why not extend touchscreens into the real world as was
| done with early versions of Logo?
|
| https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/histor...
| ryoshu wrote:
| Montessori is great. Highly recommend it. In later years
| students get access to devices in the one I'm familiar with,
| but in the early formative years they still use the same old-
| school materials for learning shapes, objects, quantities,
| math, etc.
|
| They also teach cursive. The head of curriculum talks about how
| it unlocks different neural pathways. There was recent research
| that confirmed this.
| palindome wrote:
| Went through Montessori growing up. Agree on this.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 3 1/2 years of it myself (all they offered at the time),
| missed half a year (that half year was very educational but
| not in the formal sense, I do believe my parents made the
| right choice), returned to 5th grade at to well above grade
| level.
|
| I have never studied why it was considered superior, only
| that it was.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The article mentions tying shoelaces.
|
| If you have a kid who hasn't yet learned how to tie their
| shoelaces, you might find this video helpful:
| https://youtu.be/JaBmehtalAY
|
| It shows a method called the 'Ian Knot', which:
|
| - results in the same type of knot as the common method, and
|
| - is faster because it requires fewer hand movements, and
|
| - is as easy to learn as the common method (for kids learning
| from scratch)
|
| When adults encounter it, they usually think it seems hard, but
| that's just because they're used to the method they've used
| thousands of times. It's not really harder to learn!
|
| BTW I'm pretty sure I learned about the Ian Knot here on HN. It's
| been posted a bunch of times. The first few times I saw it, I
| just bookmarked it for later. But when it was time to teach my
| son, I figured I should use the best method.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| derblitzmann wrote:
| Oh yeah, I think learned about the 'Ian knot' on hn as well,
| though I use the secure variant:
| https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I didn't know about this knot, but I'm pretty sure I tried it
| when I was kid, messing around with different ways to tie
| laces.
|
| I tried it just now, and it's indeed very secure.
|
| I almost always wear sneakers, and don't have any problem
| with laces getting untied, so I'll stick with the Ian Knot.
|
| I will suggest this secure knot to my son, though.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| Ian Knot is fast, but IMO (well, I preferred it when I was in
| kindergarten) easiest to learn for a child is Two loop knot.
|
| [1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/twoloopknot.htm
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Yes, for 35+ years I used that knot. For most of that time I
| didn't know why my loops were always crooked. Then I read
| about the granny knot, and started reversing my first knot.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| The standard/common way has the advantage of it being the
| easiest to maintain and control tension on the starter knot as
| you tie it, which is probably why it became the standard.
| SLHamlet wrote:
| Schools now giving Chromebooks to _Kindergarteners_ is some crazy
| unintentional dystopian shit.
|
| "They have little badges, like they have their password on them,
| and they just wave it in front of the Chrome Chromebook [so] they
| don't have to memorize all that early on."
|
| !!!
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If you think those kids will ever type a password in their
| life, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. I'd say
| what they are being taught is very relevant to _their_ future.
| pempem wrote:
| The thing is some of these tools have enduring 100s of years.
| Multiple generations. Others have changed in just a single
| generation to be nearly unrecognizable (ipod -> iphone)and
| their existence can be wiped away by trend/market
| making/capitalism.
|
| Learning how to use a screwdriver helps even when the
| electric is out, the internet is offline, etc. etc. Learning
| cursive may not be as immediately helpful but we have all
| come to accept that developing more neural pathways is
| important and "smooth brain" is bad
| Nasrudith wrote:
| What exactly is dystopian about it?
| WillAdams wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
| extr wrote:
| I'm not saying the thesis here is wrong - it definitely feels
| directionally correct. But I always wonder with these panics
| about children's development - do we actually know that
| developing certain types of skills at certain periods is
| critical, in the long run?
|
| I think about this often with my own kid. He was behind on speech
| milestones. I looked up outcomes for kids behind on speech
| milestones. Data shows that early intervention seems to help
| speech/reading skills into early elementary school. But there was
| very little data on the longer term outcomes. Does speech therapy
| when you're 2 or 3 years old really impact your career or
| lifetime earnings? Seems like it might for kids with true
| developmental/learning disabilities. But everyone else?
|
| As our pediatrician often says "[Outside of severe disability]
| Nobody goes off to college needing their mommy to sleep, or being
| unable to use a fork".
| nonameiguess wrote:
| At least this one is not. I've broken my dominant hand before
| and then separated the same shoulder, both in the same year,
| and was surprised to find using scissors to be the single most
| difficult thing to do with my non-dominant hand, other than
| writing. It took a few months to get it right, but that's it.
| Not like it's a lifelong deficiency. You just learn later.
| Presumably, kids with their inherently more plastic
| neuromuscular systems learn faster than a 44 year-old, too.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's because scissors are actually made for use in one hand
| or the other. Most are made for right-handed people. If
| you're left-handed (or forced to use your left hand), get
| scissors made for left-handed people and they will be easier
| to use.
| Exoristos wrote:
| How many industry leaders do you know with speech impediments?
| And, no, these impediments don't usually vanish over time -- I
| come from a large family (8 kids), and one of my youngest
| sisters was allowed to "grow out" of her inability to pronounce
| 's' and 'r' -- but it never happened, and she required speech
| therapy at 20. She still struggles. Parents are correct to pay
| attention to young-childhood milestones.
| Animats wrote:
| Reaching college without being able to use a screwdriver is a
| problem I've heard mentioned by a mechanical engineering
| professor.
|
| General Motors runs new hires through basic training for an
| assembly line, with a dummy assembly line and wooden car
| mockups.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1XVgGT4Eqo
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >But I always wonder with these panics about children's
| development
|
| The panics are definitely overblown, if not entirely wrong...
| soon, there won't be (m)any children to worry about, and then
| the human race becomes extinct (or maybe just feral). A
| glorious future awaits.
| somat wrote:
| Yeah, but think how great their planer surface manipulation will
| be later in life. /s
| ewgoforth wrote:
| As an anecdote, the summer after I graduated kindergarten I
| worked very hard to learn to tie my own shoes, because I didn't
| want to be the only student in first grade who couldn't tie his
| own shoes.
|
| When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they
| couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they
| would have been about the only kids in their grade who could.
| Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a
| kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of
| kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with
| tablets, etc.
| dmonitor wrote:
| > they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets,
| etc.
|
| I'm really curious what people mean when they say that. I
| didn't grow up with smart screens, but I've never felt
| particularly encumbered by them, and I wouldn't even consider
| using them a skill. What does the difference between a "bad
| iPad user" and a "good iPad user" really amount to? Is swiping
| Tiktok and watching Youtube really something you can become
| proficient in?
| ewgoforth wrote:
| Finding how to change a specific setting on your iPad/iPhone,
| etc.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| How is it any different than being proficient with a regular
| computer? Or any other tool? They're fast at typing, they
| know where the settings are, they can get around using muscle
| memory instead of needing to examine every screen to see
| where things are, etc etc.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Regular computers have less handrails and you can hose
| yourself.
|
| Back in the day even a 12 year old needed to at least
| sometimes poke around autoexec.bat so some understanding as
| to why things are happening was necessary.
| conductr wrote:
| Interesting take. My son is in this summer right now. He can't
| tie his shoes yet but can whistle pretty well. My passing
| theory on shoes, as opposed to my 80s experience, is twofold.
| First, the end of unstructured/unsupervised play outside means
| he's rarely/never been in a circumstance where an adult hasn't
| been near enough to tie them for him. Second, has to do with
| shoes themselves. I feel like no tie/velcro shoes didn't exist
| past toddler sizes when I was young. Maybe they did but I'm
| sure they were severely limiting compared to the options
| available today. He's even been using the pre-tied elastic
| laces for last year or more, I don't remember those at all when
| I was a kid. I remember Velcro was a something a bully might
| target you for so most kids wanted out of them asap back then.
|
| His need of this skill is lower than mine.
|
| Another example is bike riding. I was all over my neighborhood
| by first grade and BMX was a dominant hobby. My son has
| practically zero interest in even learning how to ride. There's
| no FOMO of his friends leaving him in the dust like when I was
| a kid.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| From the actual Education Week post referenced in the above
|
| "Experts say [difficulties using scissors and pencils, and
| social-emotional capabilities, such as following instructions and
| sharing] is likely in part a function of the upheaval caused by
| the pandemic--and that even students who weren't in grade school
| during the height of school closures are still experiencing the
| lingering effects."
|
| So the first piece of "evidence" cited actually discusses a whole
| range of behavioral issues -- not just the inability to use
| scissors and stack blocks or whatever -- and that these issues
| were triggered by the pandemic and its continued aftershocks --
| not tOo mUcH TOuCHscEEnZ 'n tEchNoLoGee
|
| Respect to the medium author's academic credentials and
| achievements but their post is a classic "first subscribe to my
| thinly justified POV then buy into my cult I mean product line"
| sales pitch that can only make correct decent arguments by
| accidental alignment to convenient data points.
| wrp wrote:
| People reason that if a skill is important, people need to become
| good at it, and becoming good requires starting early in life.
| This reasoning isn't valid for computer use, and I have an
| anecdote to illustrate why.
|
| When the internet was yet fairly new, I was assigned to teach
| basic computer use to a class of Saudi Arabian soldiers. Many of
| these guys were fresh out of the desert, some even still
| adjusting to the idea of wearing shoes. They had no idea what to
| do when placed in front of a computer. Imagine if your dog got up
| on its hind legs, rested its paws on the keyboard, and poked its
| nose at the screen. To cut the story short, I led them through
| this and that and by the end of a month, they certainly couldn't
| touch-type, but they were designing their own web pages. They
| were so enthusiastic that they were sneaking into the lab after
| hours (evidently to search online for pics of naked ladies).
|
| My point is that computer interfaces are designed to be simple
| and intuitive, so you don't need an early start to practice like
| you do with a highly complex task like playing a musical
| instrument. There is really no developmental benefit to early
| screen use.
| gspencley wrote:
| That's an interesting thought experiment. Counter-anecdote: My
| grandmother has been using computers in some capacity or
| another since the 1980s. And she is still, by most definitions,
| completely and utterly "computer illiterate."
|
| Her biggest blocker is that she's terrified of making a mistake
| and breaking something. She would never dare explore a settings
| menu and tweak things just to find out what is or is not
| possible. So she calls her relatives to help her with the most
| basic of task ... and this has been going on for 40-50 years of
| her life.
|
| I wonder if she had been introduced to computers younger in
| life if that fear of breaking things could have been overcome
| and replaced by a curiosity and enthusiasm to explore the
| digital space.
|
| I'm also open the possibility that this fear is a personality
| trait and impacts her in other areas of life as well. We are
| just trading anecdotes after all ;)
| aflag wrote:
| Maybe it's just not as useful to her so she doesn't bother
| learning?
| gspencley wrote:
| Possibly but I would expect her to use computers a lot less
| if that were the case. She is an Apple user - probably for
| the best since she doesn't want configurability and values
| consistency and predictability and everything being
| interoperable. But she upgrades regularly and, until her
| eye sight started to physically hinder her ability to read
| emails and perform tasks on a computer, she used them quite
| a bit for if it were a matter of "I just don't need this
| thing."
|
| To add context: she was a public school educator. Began as
| a teacher, was actually my school Principal in grade one.
| So she had a need for computers in her professional life
| and continued to use them in her personal despite tons of
| evidence that she has no idea how lol
| wrp wrote:
| I have many colleagues in the humanities who are the same,
| even though they have been heavy users of personal computers
| since the beginning. They seem to just reject retaining
| detailed operational knowledge. This seems to be distinct
| from the issue of becoming comfortable with interfaces.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| I've found that the most valuable skill when using a computer
| is the willingness to fiddle with settings and see what they
| do and what works, paired with an intuition for which
| settings are likely to break things in a way that's extremely
| painful to fix.
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