#computer literacy

[melyzard]

Okay, look, they talk to a Google rep in some of the video clips, but I give it a pass because this FREE course is a good baseline for personal internet safety that so many people just do not seem to have anymore. It's done in short video clip and article format (the videos average about a minute and a half). This is some super basic stuff like "What is PII and why you shouldn't put it on your twitter" and "what is a phishing scam?" Or "what is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS and why do you care?"

It's worrying to me how many people I meet or see online who just do not know even these absolute basic things, who are at constant risk of being scammed or hacked and losing everything. People who barely know how to turn their own computers on because corporations have made everything a proprietary app or exclusive hardware option that you must pay constant fees just to use. Especially young, somewhat isolated people who have never known a different world and don't realize they are being conditioned to be metaphorical prey animals in the digital landscape.

Anyway, this isn't the best internet safety course but it's free and easy to access. Gotta start somewhere.

Here's another short, easy, free online course about personal cyber security (GCFGlobal.org Introduction to Internet Safety)

Bonus videos:

(Jul 13, 2023, runtime 15:29)

"He didn't have anything to hide, he didn't do anything wrong, anything illegal, and yet he was still punished."

(Apr 20, 2023; runtime 9:24 minutes)

"At least 60% use their name or date of birth as a password, and that's something you should never do."

(March 4, 2020, runtime 11:18 minutes)

"Crossing the road safely is a basic life skill that every parent teaches their kids. I believe that cyber skills are the 21st century equivalent of road safety in the 20th century."

#you need to protect yourself #internet literacy #computer literacy #internet safety #privacy #online #password managers #security questions #identity theft #Facebook #browser safety #google #tesla #clearwater ai #people get arrested when google makes a mistake #lives are ruined because your Ring is spying on you #they aren't just stealing they are screwing you over #your alexa is not a woman it's a bug #planted by a supervillain who smirks at you #as they sell that info to your manager #oh you have nothing to hide? #then what's your credit card number? #listen I'm in a mood about this right now #Youtube

[titleknown]

I noticed a version of this depressing-ass post going around my dash, and I wanted to mention something like that I've noticed in a lot of Highbrow Leftist Critique that I'm really fucking sick of.

Namely, please don't fucking talk about it like it's inevitable and it's already happened rather than a thing we can stop, because People Won't Change It.

Like, as an autistic person who has A Complex due to being let down by people constantly in their life both personally and politically, it does not make me want to change things.

It makes me feel feel helpless and useless and scared, it makes me not want to bother doing anything, because why bother if the tools you use are going to be wrecked.

Not only that, it also makes me feel like the people don't have my back, because that's the underlying assumption I see behind most of them. That it is inevitable because The Horde does not want it.

This is an example of misanthropy posing as enlightenment. It is also fucking poison for any sort of collective action.

Like @headspace-hotel talks about a frustration with that in environmental movements too, and given digital stuff is near and dear to my heart too, I now know how she feels.

Like, I learned a new thing to panic about with the fucking Windows thing (here's how to un-mandate that fucking chip) but not much else!

But there are folks in the reblogs who're actually advocating shit to do about this, shoutout to @dominateeye and @aleran for doing good work, and I suppose that's my point.

Do better, don't let your pessimism become a social contagion, and advocate current action rather than predicting inevitable despair...

...Also; if you're in the US; call your congresspeople about killing these bad copyright bills and this bad censorship bill, because those are the major pathways that hypothetical DRM hellscape is going to use to get their hooks in.

#computers #computer literacy #rhetoric #argument #despair #hope #leftism #action #motivation

[rubyroboticalt]

i designed a flag/symbol for the right to repair movement because i believe it is Bull Shit that i cant repair my own phone without special tools. rights and use for making sellable stuff below the cut

feel free to use for online posters and homemade patches and stuff. i have a shop with stickers and printed shirts if u want to buy, i get $1.50 per sale so most of the cost covers the production. itll be in the replies, as the only reply probably.

id prefer if mass printed stuff thru like. teespring and redbubble was avoided as i have a shop thru that myself, but im not gonna enforce it. colors were inspired from teh communist flag ffs. its just if u wanna support me.

#right to repair #planned obsolescence #enshittification #big tech #tech literacy #computer literacy #ruby draws #my art #internet #the internet #computers #tagged for reach

[backofthebookshelf]

I've reblogged a bunch of posts about computer literacy lately, and it got me thinking - would there be any interest in a series of posts to bridge the gap between 90s style computer classes and programming 101, from an elder millennial tech support person? This is honestly my favorite kind of thing and I'm already actively suppressing the desire to go through reblogs and answer the implicit questions in tags

#computer literacy #digital natives #god i hated that phrase from day one

[thatscarletflycatcher]

The following categories are not exhaustive; they are written only to give you an idea:

*Basically computer literate: I understand the difference between what is in my computer and what is in the cloud, can operate the basic functions of Word/Excel/Power Point (or their non-Mycrosoft equivalents), can type with more than two fingers, know at least two keyboard shortcuts, know how to organize folders, and manage right click options, can learn my way around a program by trial and error.

**Computer fluent: I can operate most/all the elements of an office package. I have taken more than one college-level computer science related course. I can do basic HTML coding. I can find creative solutions to problems by using more than one program in combination. I know what a command line is and know a handful of basic commands.

***Computer proficient: I am a professional in the IT field or could be. I can "do code", and know several programming languages, and can make a program if I want. I am knowledgeable about how the innards both software and hardware work.

#computers #computer literacy #poll #Linux

[blubberquark]

Computer Literacy

Computer literacy is the most important social problem of today. At least, it’s the most important problem relative to the amount of time we spend talking about it. That makes it the most underrated social problem, and probably the one where we can achieve the most long-term improvements per unit of effort spent, but for some reason we don’t.

As computers have become more and more important, most jobs are now impossible to do without some sort of IT system in there, and that has resulted in people who used to be competent, confident and creative in their jobs throwing their hands in the air, saying “it’s a software problem, what can you do“ as automation increasingly dictates their workflows and makes them unable to even do things they used to be able to accomplish manually.

Somehow, the modern world is full of computers, and they are more important than ever, but as software has become more complicated and more difficult to use, people have become worse at using computers.

Over the last twenty years, we didn’t really get better at computer use. Instead we got used to not being able to understand what’s going on. We are also used to not being in control. Programs update themselves. Web apps change their UI. Web sites change their URL structure and invalidate all your bookmarks. Phones become obsolete in a way that makes it impossible to even run the versions of apps that used to work.

When I talk about complexity, I don’t mean the “internal” complexity of software, as in code complexity, build dependencies, software architecture, and all the tooling to manage this somehow. I mean user-visible complexity: Software is no longer an .exe file on your hard drive, but a self-updating app with a small icon that needs an online account and starts itself when your computer starts. Data is no longer a file on a floppy disk, but a collection of rows in an SQL database somewhere in %APPDATA%, or worse, a collection of rows in an SQL database in the cloud behind a REST API that is actually not REST but just RPC over HTTP.

Computer literacy is a moving target. That makes it difficult to teach. I suspect that the software industry wants it that way.

In their quest to “simplify“ software, vendors turn every application into a black box or a walled garden, denying users ways to re-use knowledge gained from other apps. Can you share the document you are editing with your friends by sharing the URL in your browser? If it was a file, you could save it and share the file with a friend. Online, all bets are off. Maybe the URL thing works, maybe the application has its own internal sharing system that requires your friends to make accounts, so you can “connect“ with them, and only then can you select them from a drop-down menu to share your document with, or maybe the application automatically scrapes your friends from facebook.

When I was in 7th grade, I had “basic computer lessons“, sponsored by Microsoft. We learned how many bits there were in a byte, how to send e-mail with hotmail.com, and what to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for. What we did not learn was how to uninstall software, how to burn a CD, or how to send e-mail attachments. The “child-proofing” software installed on the school computers prevented us from accessing the file system.

Important tasks such as

connecting to a wireless network

printing on a shared network printer

getting your PowerPoint to display on an external screen or projector

verifying that an e-mail is indeed coming from your friend or your bank

were left out.

(Aside: Why don’t banks sign their mail with PGP?)

In the mean time, what has gotten worse was not education. It was software itself. Software has gotten more and more hostile to computer literacy. Some software is actively hostile to deep understanding now, and increasingly it’s also becoming hostile to shallow understanding and muscle memory. Good luck with your new iPad air, we have moved all the buttons around, and have hidden basic functionality behind gestures. Tapping this does nothing, maybe try swiping it, pinching it, shaking it, with three fingers, swipe from the edge of the screen, whoops you switched apps now. It’s no longer possible for an end user to understand software. It’s no longer possible for third parties to even write “the missing handbook” of Slack or Google Docs or Spotify or Dropbox or indeed the iPad. It will be obsolete before it hits the shelves.

Related: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/

#computer literacy #End-user Computing

[delcat177]

I forgot to set VLC as my default video program after updating, and Microsoft Media is apparently now charging $1 a pop for codec packs

and by God, there are people paying it, aren't there

ETA: VideoLan is a nonprofit and VLC media player is totally free. It works with every file format I've ever tangled with, and immediately played back the file with no difficulty. Get dinked Microsoft

#codec #okay but seriously #it's one banana michael #how much can it cost #zero dollars? #tech #microsoft #vlc media player #vlc #free stuff #computer literacy #education #educate yourself #and for the record i have a netflix subscription but you can't video edit netflix ok

[paradoxcase]

Because I have no idea what Gen Z kids mean when they say "download":

Please reblog, I want actual Gen Z people to answer this, which means it has to leave my corner of tumblr

If you picked the last option, please leave a comment or a tag with what you think "download" means, because I honestly have no idea what it could be

For bonus points, please specify if you think "upload" and "install" mean different things than "download" or if they are all just different words for the same thing in your idiolect

#polls #language #language change #computer literacy

[weisscoldglare]

Can you remake the scene of the ROTTMNT movie with Weiss as Donnie and Blake as Mikey. The scene is where Donnie hacks the kraang ship with his hands. (I really hope you know what I'm talking about because I don't have a link)

im so sorry i have no idea, when i looked it up all I got was Soft Shell Donnie hooking up to the ship. Pretty sure that's not what you meant. But have Blake witnessing Weiss's Techi time.

#weiss schnee #shenanigans #rwby #computer literacy #while weiss does know code she def would take longer than peitro or penny #so it makes sense shes never used her skills #at least thats what i tell myself #idunno #coldglareshares #blake belladonna #idek

[this-is-a-love-story-isnt-it]

I was thinking about that post I reblogged about how GenZ don’t know how to use computers because they do everything on their phones. And it’s weird because I’m an elder millennial or X-ennial, and the parents of most kids I went to school with were computer illiterate. They (my classmates and friends) never used computers much, either. My dad is a tech guy so I’d been using computers since I was little, even when me and my brother were just playing dos games or MS Paint. But a lot of my friends were computer illiterate until we were in like high school and more of my friends were getting home PC’s and AOL.

I learned how to use computers by using them.

But anyway, in my experience, boomers were computer illiterate for a long time, or they only knew what they had to know for work and never did anything else with one. Most Millenials grew up with computers in their houses, and we didn’t have smartphones. And now it seems like Boomers and older Gen-x LOVE their iPads. My mom never uses a computer. She only uses her phone and ipad. My dad’s still a techy guy so he’s still using computers. I use my laptop for everything as long as it’s nearby. I know how to use Windows and MacOS. I grew up with PC’s, but I started buying macbooks around 12 years ago.

And now apparently Gen Z are boomers when it comes to computers. Computer illiterate because they only use their phones and tablets for everything.

So it almost seems like as a generation, millenials (and younger Gen-X?) are the only generation to really know how to use a computer. (i’m just talking about the generation as a whole, and not individual people)

#computers #computer literacy

[titleknown]

...You know, it says a lot that we haven't seen much moral panic over how smartphones seem to be leading to widespread computer illiteracy amongst the yonger generations, given that (at least from what I've been seeing) that's actually true.

Maybe that's a social fear we should push on a little harder, if only so we can fucking do something about it.

Like, at the very least we should start actively shaming boomer parents (who can afford it) that treat an Iphone as a substitute for a decent laptop/desktop, and making actual resources for teaching kids how to use real-ass computers instead of Android/Iphone bullshit...

#smartphones #computer literacy #computer illiteracy #scary #important #yikes

[shitbrainratface]

Kids don't even have family computers anymore! Give them a break!

*"Capitalists depend on us relying on them" here specifically is about websites slowly converting to be only useable on mobile, making the "family computer" unneeded and have people only rely on their phones. Less and less children are being given opportunities to learn how to use a computer and customize their online experience. Only accessing the internet through your phone also gives more tracking opportunities, which kids are being taught to think of as unavoidable and not care about.

#I was one of those kids who's teachers struggled not to laugh at because I couldn't understand basic concepts despite starting out confident #I am vagueposting but trust me I am aware that I do not know anything about that teacher & how they teacg #i could tell that my teachers thought i was pathetic but maybe that person's tone was light hearted and I misread it #maybe OP wasnt even blaming the children themselves but I could tell some people in the comments were #once a week I just see a new ''if someone is ignorant or annoying its because they are bad and deserve to be mocked'' and i dont like it #NOT saying that was the original poster's message - but some people definitely took it that way #computer literacy

[evelynstarshine]

Ok like, video games in the 90s, 00s, 10s, weren't simple to play, they were easy to play, but not simple. For a kid to play them, they had to learn typing, ambidextrous keyboard and mouse usage, computer literacy (in game menus/windows work the same as office programmes&windows did), also literacy literacy, there were loads of words, without modern graphics they relied alot on words. But, kids games of the 2020s, theyre designed with to be as playable, low barrier of entry and high clicks and ad revunue and built on gambling-psychology to keep kids playing not challenge. Like this isn't a grr nostalgia good modern bad, this is gaming industry has changed priorities. And like outside of Nintendo, mainstream/adults games, are not made for people who have been playing games since they were 8 and their now 40. High barrier of entry, expensive and not really open to kids. So kids aren't learning those skills through them either, or learning through kids games the skills to play adult/mainstream games.

Like two big problems here, one kids aren't learning those skills that go on to be computer literacy that jobs are now expecting young people to have. And way less importantly, the gaming industry now has no sustainability because the gaming demographic is acouple generations, it's not getting a hold of the youth the way it used to.

#video games #computer literacy #pedagogy

[bellaswansong]

reblog to tell gen Z/alpha that you can press the tab key to move your cursor to the next box in an online form. no need to move your mouse!

this works on most webpages and computers; i use it after i type my username on websites that have you input both your username and password at the same time

#digital literacy #computer literacy #gen z culture #what the spork? im speakin here!

[blind3dbylight]

My issues with the userbase at large aside, if you are genuinely interested in, and are able to install, Linux and want to learn it, I suggest starting with either Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Mint is designed to be familiar to users coming off Windows or macOS, while Ubuntu is designed to be just different enough to encourage learning. Both are considered the most beginner-friendly distros and are perfect for someone just starting out with Linux. (I tortured myself by learning some Linux on Debian.)

And bear in mind that things are not always going to work right off. You will frequently need to do some legwork to get things working and configured. You will have to learn to use the terminal. You will have to do a lot of tinkering. And sometimes, what you’re trying to do just won’t go.

But do not let the insular userbase scare you off. Don’t let the people who scream “RTFM” intimidate you. There are plenty of resources and people willing to help out a newcomer to Linux and FOSS in general. I’m not a great resource on it (I’m primarily a Mac user) but they are out there.

#light says a thing #linux #computer literacy #foss

[normal-newt]

Often made to feel silly because never learnt all the computer thing people my age seem to know. Feel like a 70 year old suddenly introduced to computer with no help.

You know how some autistic people talk about feeling like everyone else took a "normal social skills" class that they somehow missed? Am one of the people who feels like that, and just assumed that was what was going on with computers too.

Until remembering that we actually, literally Did take a class on it. But because not able to process things fast enough, my teachers just stopped helping me keep up.

Yeah. Turns out struggle with computers is partly the actual symptoms which am not able to change, but also that never taught how to adapt to them, and never even taught normal skills.

Which... is not fair for other people to make me feel bad for any of that actually. But also means might be able to help self.

Anyway, slowly learning little tricks, now that am aware they actually exist.

And also, think that any attempt at helping older people learn computers needs to include the fact that they are actually old. Not the same as a kid or teenager.

They have similar problems as me! Struggle with seeing small text and struggle with memory. Sometimes they also struggle with learning new things.

But so many computer literacy classes designed don't teach them accessibility features. Really think very first step of teaching someone who is disabled Or old to use computers is making sure it is actually use-able. Teach them to get to settings and change font size, teach them magnifying and narrating tools, teach them how to connect hearing aids to computers. Teach them how use memory aids, write list of short cuts on sticky notes.

And maybe, while at it, don't leave younger disabled people out in cold either. Maybe remember we live in digital world and equal access needs include that as much as humanly possible. Maybe don't leave huge groups of people isolated from huge parts of society.

Know computer skills not "fix" disability. Know not all of us able to do all things. Buy think it is worth giving us as much of a chance as possible.

#maybe are mistakes here but #think general idea is there? #idk feel free give feedback here if got anything wrong #computer literacy #long post