Sweden embraced screens in classrooms and pushed books aside. Years later, the country is making a costly reversal that says everything about what went wrong.
I have a whole schpiel I could get into about it, but I’m busy so the TL;DR is that the whole point of a computer is its programmability – its ability to solve novel, bespoke problems that are unique to a single user’s needs. That means you’re not actually “computer literate” unless you can program, or at least pipe together some console commands or figure out a novel workflow in a collection of GUI apps or whatever. It’s not about touch-typing or rote memorization of specific functions in common apps; it’s about developing general-purpose problem-solving skills. Those are valuable for everyone, not just professional software engineers.
Plus, knowing at least a little bit about how computers work is increasingly crucial in terms of understanding things like, say, the limitations of LLMs. That, I hope you can agree, is important for much the same reasons media literacy is.
Why? Some kids, maybe, but it’s pretty useless for 99% of people. Kids should be taking media literacy classes.
I have a whole schpiel I could get into about it, but I’m busy so the TL;DR is that the whole point of a computer is its programmability – its ability to solve novel, bespoke problems that are unique to a single user’s needs. That means you’re not actually “computer literate” unless you can program, or at least pipe together some console commands or figure out a novel workflow in a collection of GUI apps or whatever. It’s not about touch-typing or rote memorization of specific functions in common apps; it’s about developing general-purpose problem-solving skills. Those are valuable for everyone, not just professional software engineers.
Plus, knowing at least a little bit about how computers work is increasingly crucial in terms of understanding things like, say, the limitations of LLMs. That, I hope you can agree, is important for much the same reasons media literacy is.