[OT] HyperCard and the Interactive Web

[Bob Sneidar]

I have to disagree. You are saying, it seems, that we have to dumb down the OS for everyone in order to accommodate those unable or unwilling to learn as much as they need to use it. I for one, cringe at the prospect of an OS that limited what I could do or how I could do it. 

I do think this underscores a principle I have been stating for years, that advancements in technology (at least consumer technology) cannot continue to increase linearly forever. A good friend of mine contends that it can! But I argue that you soon reach a point where the average user simply refuses the technology on the grounds that it is too much mental work to embrace it. The genius of iOS is that it was written as the OS for the rest of the rest of us. ;-) 

One more point. If we want to advance technology in the consumer world, we are going to have to first make great advancements in the educational world, and I have been watching a marked trend in the opposite direction for most of my 56 years on this planet. 

Bob


On Feb 14, 2012, at 10:06 PM, Peter Bogdanoff wrote:

> When I started working at UCLA in 1996 very few students had used computers before entering, or at least had used their own computers rather than a lab one in grade school. Now 15 years later all have a laptop in class. However, about 3/4 of the Mac-using students in a music history class use Spotlight to find files and open applications on their Macs and most of these don't know any other way to find their files. In other words, they don't really have a clue how the file system works. I only started to discover this when I had them install a project that I'm developing and found out that many have been running it from their Downloads folder and didn't know to do it any other way.
> 
> Would you call these people computer-literate? They sure are Web and social media literate. So the sooner OS X moves to an iOS-type Finder the better for them. It could be that OS X is just too easy to use and so they never learn more than Word, Google, YouTube, and Facebook. The Windows users seem to know a little more, at least their own version of Samsung Windows or Dell Windows, but it's only a little more.
> 
> Peter Bogdanoff
> UCLA
> 
> On Feb 14, 2012, at 12:44 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> 
>> It is frightening to think that so many "kids" grow up to be adults and NEVER form the thought, "Maybe I don't know all about...". What positions do they eventually come to hold where doing the wrong thing means damage, pain and suffering and even death to themselves or others? 
>> 
>> Maybe what we ought to be impressing constantly on children is the incredible amount of knowledge they do NOT know? Maybe on the first day of computer class we should be overwhelming them with information that is WAAAY over their heads, and tell them that the following morning there will be a quiz on it. Then next morning tell them there is no quiz, but you do not ever want to hear the phrase, "I know all about..."
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
>> 
>> On Feb 14, 2012, at 11:41 AM, Richmond wrote:
>> 
>>> Certainly no flies on you!
>>> 
>>> Far more important, to my mind, is the fact that kids nowadays keep telling me they "know all
>>> about computers". Then I turn on the computers in the school and they ask me where Windows
>>> Explorer is, and when I explain that these computers work with something called Linux they say
>>> "but everybody knows that computers cannot work without Windows".
>>> 
>>> I wonder how many operating systems there are, apart from Windows, currently available to
>>> run bog-basic PCs?
>> 
>> 
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