Column: Ageist issues against computers
While school computer use may be nirvana for some, it creates misery for others.
Victoria Williamson wrote, “Computer technology can’t be underestimated, as it continues to evolve in schools and workplace. It made the access and the provisions of the education services easier, convenient to handle and cheaper. It also made the life of the teacher comfortable in handling classes and creating teaching materials. Computers have revolutionized education and it is leading to the bright future.”
The future is brighter for students and teachers weaned on electronic devices. For both older students and teachers, access to educational and workplace services has become difficult and inconvenient while the costs have skyrocketed.
My first interaction with a computer interface for school was forced upon me in 1977. It involved keypunching a stack of IBM cards after learning FORTRAN, handing it through a window to a computer geek and waiting fifteen minutes for a printout for a statistics problem.
My most recent pain took place while trying to complete a single sheet tax form for my job that required an internet connection, a computer, a printer, a pen, a scanner, infinite patience with a sad excuse for a computer interface and emails between three people.
Fifty years ago, only a pen and one government printed form would be required and then completed in less than a minute and placed on a desk. Productivity is now losing to tech.
For those not born to be immediately placed in front of a screen with a user interface and a game controller, everything about working with a bad interface is a challenge. The opportunities for frustration leading to anger are abundant.
Small, difficult to see items, often meaningless icons, appear and disappear in many interfaces, leading to somewhere or nowhere, or may offer boxes to tick with or without confirmation that anything has happened at all.
With the pandemic and often involuntary shift to online instruction, all the problems possible and weak points have been magnified for both students and teachers.
Forget about asking a question or going back and starting over. Only the determined will not give up and go to a more passive screen situation where nothing more than a blank stare is required and likely little will be learned.
Remember this when observing your teachers who have been forced to work in unfamiliar territory, you might lose their wisdom because of the box they are forced to work through.
It may be time to reevaluate what does and what does not need a computer interface and those programmers writing code for bad interfaces should be exiled and their work replaced with something more user friendly to all.
