Computer Literate? No Way!

Yet, it can’t be computer illiteracy. These students are highly computer literate.

The
educrats at my university have been ladling out this pernicious lie for
years now. Like most other skills, computer literacy has been dumbed
down to mean setting the Tivo, dialing a cell phone one-handed,
pirating music off the Internet, hooking up with perverts in chat
rooms, and downloading p0rn. Truly useful stuff like spreadsheets or
programming languages are “outside their schema.”

A few of my
juniors are happily graphing distributions and Solving maximum
likelihood problems with Excel after some growing pains; the rest are
still struggling with entering formulas. One of them looked at the number 1.9E-05 and interpreted it as an error. It’s going to be a long semester.

Another of my annoying comments, this one at RightWingNation.