Is good technology bad for us?

So this week we kick of with a new course for the 1st years called, very creatively, Computer Applications. Unlike the courses I teach to 2nd and 3rd year students called ,very creatively, Computer Applications, this one does not focus on a specific specialised application but rather basic computer usage. So why do we have to teach children growing up with computers to use computers I hear you ask. Good question, I do not know exactly the right answer but I will share my observations over the past 3-4 years with you and why I suggested this course.

I have noticed increasingly that the students are doing very stupid things on their PC's and Macs. Ironically while I was typing this another case walked into my office for help. I will use him as an example of what I mean by "stupid". First, these kids are not stupid, they are very bright in fact which makes this more baffling.

This one was downloading files (read - torrent) and received a message that he was running out of disk space. So he decided to makes some space..by moving (thankfully not deleting) his Program Files folder to another disk. Mayhem ensued...

This is not the only case, I have had deleted page files, deleted Windows folders, installations directly onto an external harddrive and one who installed everything directly on C:\ drive..no folders.

So why would these kids who grow up with this technology have no clue? The answer dawned on me while I was reading City of Ember, a book meant for a younger audience than me but still a fun story. In this story people were trapped in a city underground where everything was failing and they had no idea how to fix it.

I then realised that I am in the same boat...or car rather. I can drive, I have made enough small accidents to be a carefull driver. I know what the clutch, the brakes etc does. in theory I know how this works but when that engine stops working I am as clueless as a grasshopper, yet my father was able to fix most issues by himself. I am using technology without understanding how to fix it. The earlier generations also had cars, but like them it is an older technology. It broke, frequently. If you owned a car at some point you had to figure out how stuff works or learn if you did not want to spend most of your time waiting walking to the nearest civilisation to make a call. Over the years the technology improved and not it hardly breaks..in theory. I have had 3 major breakdowns in my whole life. The first time the exhaust broke loose underneath the car and I had to fix it with whatever I could get my hands on. The other two times the AA was at hand to help. In all my years of driving I have therefore learned that some things will not hold an exhaust and that the exhaust is damn hot after 300km's, thus not much.

With computers on the other hand I had my first when it was still relatively new consumer tech. It broke, frequently. I had to learn how to fix it, how to maintain it and how to optimise it just to use it. I learned at a young age that deleting the root was a bad idea, why a hard drive and RAM are two different things (I only had a PC with a hard drive when I was 14) and that renaming the file sequence would cause ladies in my strip poker game to start naked and put on clothes when they win. (necessity breads creativity)

These days the kids coming into my classes have never worked on a PC without a mouse, never worked on a command line and have a built in wizard to fix any issue. Network down? Let Windows fix it for you. The only good thing is they never had to endure the Jar Jar Binks of Microsoft Office..Clippy!

So our problem is that the technology is working so well that very few have learnt what goes on behind the scenes, let alone fix it. This information would not be important if it was not for the fact that growing up with the technology means that they are not afraid of it anymore. The do not believe that deleting the wrong things will cause the screen to blow up anymore so they go ahead and delete..and then blow up the OS.

So we will teach them the basics:

• Why downloads can be bad.
• Why you need t uninstall instead of just deleting.
• Why deleting will not cure the "Insufficient memory" error.
• Why the Windows folder needs to stay where it is.
• Why I accidentally say directory instead of folder
• Why installing that toolbar in IE can be a bad idea.
• Why your 2Gb cellC cap was gone in 10 mins (think bittorrent and gnutella)
• Why backing up is not such a bad idea
• What exactly is that IP thingy..and so on.

and hopefully I will not have a student coming to me again with "My MS Office doing weird stuff so my boyfriend formatted my laptop but now I cant find my projects".

Fingers crossed...