How would you learn keyboard typing, if one always types on the phone?! (I am not even Z and have to look on the keyboard)
I’ve literally never heard Gen Z described as tech savvy.
The boomers says that to them but that’s really not true, this day this generation is less and less “tech savvy”, they’re just good at using the basic way social media
Yes.
Calling GenZ tech savvy for always using a cell phone is like calling grandma a mathematician because she spends all day at the slot machine.
Boomers go confused when gen y switch to gen z and forget to get updated script from cable teeeveee
Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.
back when i was still a teenager, ww did battle ourselfes who typed faster even without a keyboard lol. We just typed on a table or something just based on our finger memory of where which key is normally on a keyboard. This days i often type on my smartphone, but you can’t rly type a lot or fast on phones so i still prefer normal computer typing for most things. But people who just chat and don’t code or similar…yeah, they probably are mostly only using their phone. my sister as an example hasn’t used her laptop for nore than 4 years, probably more… and just does everything on her phone.
Swype typing can get pretty fast tbh. But that greatly depends upon the software.
Despite the hate it got, Windows Phone’s default keyboard had a far superior swype experience as compared to Android and iOS.Microsoft actually ported their keyboard to android, called “Microsoft SwiftKey” or similar. It’s a great keyboard, but apparently now has copilot ಠ_ಠ
I taught a bunch of Gen Zers back when they were in high school. None of them knew how to type well, and it was a rarity that any of them knew how to type at all. I was supposed to teach them things like Microsoft Office, but we had to start with typing and basic PC usage before we could move on to something as complicated as MS Word.
This is what happens when people don’t use computers and instead just use cell phones.
And Chromebooks. All the schools pretty much use Chromebooks, at least in my region
It’s pretty messed up that schools enforce those things onto kids. Chromebooks, while cheap, invade the hell out of your privacy and are extremely restrictive. We should be teaching kids GNU/Linux, not ChromeOS… I honestly feel sorry for the future of free software. Students aren’t taught ethics, freedom, or privacy at ALL. I was in school, (graduated two years ago), and it seemed that every teacher adapted the “you don’t have privacy” motto. Absolutely terrible. Buy the kids a Dell Latitude E6400 and put Libreboot/Trisquel with KDE on it. Let them live and help each other out with issues. It would be super heart warming to see schools adapt something like this instead.
(I understand the convenience issues, but we should start adapting, its crazy that Gen Z barely know anything about computers)
Not being fast at typing does not mean you are not tech savvy. There is more to tech than typing. Like an architect doesn’t need to be good at brick-laying to be a good architect.
Funny that you chose an architect. Since they are basically document producers (also software architects), they tend to be able to type pretty proficiently.
But that is not the comparison they drew, and you know that.
Every single article about “gen x” this or “gen z” that is 100% bullshit. Stop reposting this garbage.
Really, the media finally realized millennials don’t care if we killed Applebee’s or whatever, and they’ve moved on to the next thing to scare boomers with. “They hate us because we buy bags of paper napkins” becomes “They hate us because we can use old style keyboards.” Generations are not a monolith. You can compare them, but it’s stupid to pass judgment in that way.
STFU, Younger Gen BADD!!
Fuck off old gen, we hate you now. Fo rizz no cap etc.
Juvenoia
Do public schools not teach keyboarding anymore? I ask because I had a keyboarding classe two-hrs 1day per week in grade school plus a full class one year in 7th grade and then again for a full year in high school, and they were always taught by some of the oldest teachers in the school. -My high-school teacher started his career teaching typewriter typing something like three or four decades prior to teaching me in 2004. It seems strange that new young people aren’t getting that same basic education.
I don’t know if they do but if they do I doubt they’ve improved. The technique taught by many touch typing courses is a recipe for a wrist injury. It blows my mind that regulatory bodies aren’t calling for keyboard layout reform. The “normal” row stagger keyboard as well as the qwerty layout should be in museums, not on billions of “modern” computers around the world.
As someone who uses colemak only on my phone because I was curious, what kind of layouts and configurateon would you recommend as a new default?
Funny enough I use Colemak with my ergonomic (split, columnar stagger) keyboards only, and qwerty on mobile (and on my laptop since it has qwerty keyboard labels).
I recommend, in order of increasing effort:
- briefly learn touch typing but then develop your own style with a more relaxed wrist position that de-emphasizes excessive hand movement, uncomfortable movements and crazy pinky stretches
- get a columnar stagger, split keyboard
- learn colemak (I like Colemak DH)
What made you pick Colemak over Dvorak? I am not criticizing your choice, just curious. I chose Dvorak because I found the vowels on the home row cut my hand movement a lot. I fully agree with you on the pinky stretches, that’s my worst movement, which I triage by turning on KDE’s “Caps Lock is another backspace” option.
Dvorak was designed a long time ago for typewriters, i.e. it tries to alternate hand movements, which some people like but many find it makes them slower.
Colemak is meant to be closer to qwerty and was designed for computer keyboards.
Then again I’m sure Dvorak is already miles better than qwerty and the differencesneith Colemak are minor. I think the reason I chose it originally was because of some youtube video but I don’t remember what it was called.
Also I really like the Colemal DH mod.
I still want to get a split keyboard at some point and I’d love for it to be columnar stagger. I don’t do too much typing these days, but I’d love to make the typing I do just a bit more enjoyable.
It was a real game changer for me. If you combine it with layers for accessing numbers, arrows, symbols, home/end etc without moving your hand, it makes typing so much comfier and faster
I have some 60% keyboards. The layers make me slow and they’re not very comfortable. But everyone keeps saying they’re amazing, so I’m waiting for it to click.
Tbf most of my layer toggles are happening with a thumb, which isn’t possible on a normal keyboars because they give you a 10x wide key for your most flexible digit, and no other keys in reach.
I recommend a keyboard with at least 3 keys in the thumb cluster. Once you figure out what you like and get used to it, it’s like a superpower
qwertz ftw.
*duck and run*
I like the free stretchies I get from Ctrl+Z on the DE layout.
I used to switch back and forth between qwerty and qwertz on two different computers, and the laptop unlock passwords had a z in them. That was tough times.
We didn’t have specific typing class but we had IT in both primary and secondary, at least late gen z got plenty of computer time in school and most I know in my generation are decent typists at least
When I was a kid they taught penmanship too. I was awful at it but then when I was an adult I had a job where I actually had to use those skills and I was glad to have them - same with everything I learned in Home Ec, most the stuff I learned in wood/metal/auto shop, etc. I think all of those classes are extinct now, based on how people talk about school never teaching them anything useful.
We’re not even teaching them cursive anymore and they still can’t type? What are they doing in schools?
Gen alpha is learning cursive. Gen z is all highschool and college now.
-worked in a k-8 tutoring program for 2 years.
Good to know because the gen zer at work said she never learned it. So it may be up to each school district.
I’m also gen z and I learned it. I’m also 24.
I thought Gen Alpha was very explicitly NOT learning cursive.
Idk what to tell you. This is also a public school, and not a private school.
My gen alpha kids got it in 3rd grade. Or rather one did and one is about to.
As a Gen Z - cursive is very much still taught in first grade, and not like you can forget it either because most school assignments are required in paper form, same for lecture notes. You’re not writing this much and this fast without cursive.
Do these things correlate that much tho? Not to toot my own horn, but I am fairly tech-proficient and have terrible typing skills. My technique is somewhere in between hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, despite regular typing lessons in elementary school. I imagine a lot of other people are like this, and vice-versa as well.
Do these things correlate that much tho?
Not at all. Is there any other profession than journalist where words per minute matters?
Court room stenographer
Don’t you love throwing a whole bunch of people with different backgrounds into one bucket? 🙄
The tech-savvy reputation comes from the “digital native” narrative i.e. because they grew up with computers they must know computers, which is a silly fallacy because how one interacts with technology makes all the difference. It’s the same reason why everyone who grew up with electricity isn’t necessarily an electrician.
In the days of Apple II and similar machines a person who operated a computer knew it, because computers were simpler and because there was no other way and because you’d generally buy a cheaper toy if you didn’t want to learn it.
Also techno-optimism of the 70s viewed the future as something where computers make the average person more powerful in general - through knowing how to use a computer in general, that is, knowing how to write programs (or at least “create” something, like in HyperCard).
That was the narrative consistent with the rest of technology and society of that time, where any complex device would come with schematics and maintenance instructions.
Then something happened - most humans couldn’t keep up with the growing complexity. Something like that happened with me when I went to uni with undiagnosed AuDHD. There was a general path in the future before me - going there and learning there - but I didn’t know how I’m going to do that, and I just tried to persuade myself that I must, it should happen somehow if I do same things others do with more effort. Despite pretense and self-persuasion, I failed then.
It’s similar to our reality. The majority stopped understanding what happens around them, but kept pretending and persuading itself that it’s just them, that the new generation is fine with it all, that they don’t need those things they fail to understand, etc. Like when in class you don’t understand something, but pretend to. All the older generation does that. The younger generation does another thing - they try to ignore parts of the world they don’t understand, like hiding their heads in the sand. Or like a bullied kid just tries not to think about bullies. Or like a person living in a traditionally oppressive state just avoids talking about politics and society.
That narrative has outlived its reality not only with computers.
People are eager to believe in magic. Do you need to know how to cook if you have dinner and breakfast trees (thank you, LF Baum)? So they think we have such trees. It’s an illusion, of course. Very convenient, isn’t it, to make so many industries inaccessible to amateurs.
It’s very simple. There’s such a thing as “too complex”. The tower of Babel is one fitting metaphor.
You don’t need this complexity in an AK rifle. Just like that, you don’t need it in an analog TV. And in a digital TV you need much less complexity too. We don’t have it in our boots - generally. We don’t have it in our shirts. Why would we have it in things with main functionality closer to them in complexity than to SW combat droids?
I think Stanislaw Lem called this a “combinatoric explosion” when predicting it in one of his essays.
But then came smartphones, and instead they grew up with that…
The tech savvy reputation comes from millenials. We ARE tech savvy.
Only the early ones. By definition millenials are birth years 1981 to 1996, so the last ones were 11 when the first iPhone released.
I think every generation has their percentage of nerds and that just was a little higher in late Gen X and early millenials because computers were so new and you had to tinker to get anything working.
As an older Gen Z, yeah you guys probably have a better grasp on modern tech. Weirdly enough I actually have found that a weirdly high amount of folks my age know old analogue tech better, like vacuum tubes and old cars.
Older gen z here too, born in ‘99, and while I haven’t noticed the analogue thing, I’ve 100% noticed tech illiteracy in general.
Like, I’m talking about having a downloads folder full of junk because they don’t know that that’s where downloads end up. Installers left untouched after programs are installed because they’re worried that deleting the installer will delete the installed program.
Imo being raised with closed ecosystems like iPhones really stunted tech literacy for a lot of people. I grew up jailbreaking my phones and used my parent’s windows pc, so I kind of escaped it.
Yeah im also '99, and the weird analogue thing is probably regional. Yeah I agree that the tech illiteracy comes down largely to closed systems like Iphone, the most tech literate folks I know that are our age were largely on the poorer side of working class. Which makes sense if you are using hand me down tech ya probably will be doing a bit of debugging.
Being a tool user doesn’t make one a tool maker, though having grown up in the days you had to assemble and maintain your own tools does naturally facilitate growing into the latter from the former.
Right? I grew up with pen and paper, but I’m better with keyboards.
I built my Gen Z nephew a PC with a GTX 950 a few years back. When I went by to gift him a new video card I found out that he hooked up his video output from the motherboard the whole time. Don’t know how that reflects on all kids from his generation but it was kinda funny.
That’s funny but is a mistake that much more tech savvy people make. Although, they would figure out they made a mistake much sooner.
That fps ain’t right dawg!
DRI_PRIME=1 goes brrrr
Pretty sure someone who doesn’t know to plug their GPU in is probably not running Linux
Idk, i specifically plug it into motherboard since i use cheap used gpus that can break easily, example is Nvidia p106, it doesn’t even have video output, and it’s easier to flip DRI_PRIME from 1 to 0 than redo the cables
but gen z is not tech savvy. They can use a browser. and watch youtube. They never advance past that stage
You would think they know how to use a browser but in reality they only use apps. TikTok being their preferred search engine speaks volumes.
😔
Man look at millennials turning into boomers at record pace
“back in my day we did things properly, now all these damn kids… etc etc”
it’s not becoming boomers. It’s about rarely meeting one who knows that, for example, wifi is not the internet. I’m not asking for detailed tech knowledge. But getting a blank face if asked something as simple as “where did you save the file?” or replying with “in the gallery/google photos” means you are not tech savvy. these are the absolute basics.
What’s your sample size, do you actually talk to many gen z
If you asked them where they saved a photo on a smartphone they’re not going to tell you a filepath because that’s not how people use smartphones. I probably couldn’t tell you where photos are stored physically on my phone without going out of my way to find that info
Also Google photos is a valid answer to that question because the file is saved in Google photos, just because it’s cloud storage doesn’t make it not storage. In that case local storage is basically just a cache anyway
What’s your sample size, do you actually talk to many gen z
They aren’t the only ones to have noticed this issue.
If you asked them where they saved a photo on a smartphone…
“Where did you save the file” isn’t typically asked in the context of a smart phone. Maybe on Android more so than iOS.
So not tech savvy?
because that’s not how a phone is used.
But it is how any phone/desktop/laptop pollworks. So you’re proving my point. Most can’t even tell if the file they want is on the device in the first place, if they use stuff like cloud backups. To those people, the file is “in google”. Not tech savvy
I think for the most part they are just “good” at using mainstream social medias nothing really more
I feel like this calls for the importance of not just inundation but actual education for kids.
We basically let a whole generation have the relationship with the most common and arguably valuable be defined by advertising companies.
