Marc Scott, with an extremely thoughtful article on the prevailing myth that all young people are technology wizards:
Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you’re twenty-five or over. It’s something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, particularly web-apps. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they’re lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking Klingon.
They click ‘OK’ in dialogue boxes without reading the message. They choose passwords like qwerty1234. They shut-down by holding in the power button until the monitor goes black. They’ll leave themselves logged in on a computer and walk out of the room. If a program is unresponsive, they’ll click the same button repeatedly until it crashes altogether.
How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?
In one way, parents perpetuate the myth because their children use technology more than they do. The perception is that the kids must then be advanced. However, using something and understanding how it works are two very different things.
A lot of people aren’t familiar with meteorology beyond what they see on television. The truth is, our field is essentially a branch of applied physics. Computers and programming are quickly becoming essential tools. From my own experience as a graduate student, and now post-doc, our field suffers the same problems that Scott describes.
Often, incoming graduate students and faculty enter the field without so much as a working knowledge of operating systems and simple scripting. Many write papers and share tons of pretty figures about numerical model results without so much as a clue how to install the code, how their tool functions, and what the various physical schemes contained within actually represent. It’s frankly embarrassing. Yet, they are viewed by many as savvy. Why? Because they use the technology more than the preceding generation. Such false praise only further skews these people’s internal gauge of success.
Now, ignorance of a subject isn’t something to condemn - however, it always irked me when people are not self-motivated when presented with their own shortcomings. I’ve been in classes where programming was required and the students with limited computer skills just mooched off of someone else. It speaks to a larger problem where hard things are simply passed off to others. It’s a discouraging problem and I like Scott’s suggestions to improve the situation.