There seems to be a bit of a critical period for learning to read, where if you don't become a fluent reader by the time you are 12 or so, you're pretty unlikely to become a fluent reader in any language later in life. This lack of early literacy has all kinds of knock on effects for your life and what opportunities will be open for you.
I can see arguments both ways on how that applies to computers. The elderly seem fairly inflexible in their ability to adapt to new technology, and a lot of us just soaked up tech when we were in high school or college. I've heard from people I know who work in technical education that because of the chromebook-ifcation of grade school, fewer high schoolers are fluent in directory structure and other basics to being good with computers.
The thing that makes me back off a bit from saying that computer literacy is just like literacy as a skill, is that what it means to use and be good with computers is dramatically changing every 5-10 years. What it means to learn to read is not, even if we read more short form and less long form than we used to, the basics of phonics haven't changed. With tech we seem to constantly be moving up to higher and higher levels of abstraction and what's going on under the hood is increasingly blurred.
There seems to be a bit of a critical period for learning to read, where if you don't become a fluent reader by the time you are 12 or so, you're pretty unlikely to become a fluent reader in any language later in life. This lack of early literacy has all kinds of knock on effects for your life and what opportunities will be open for you.
I can see arguments both ways on how that applies to computers. The elderly seem fairly inflexible in their ability to adapt to new technology, and a lot of us just soaked up tech when we were in high school or college. I've heard from people I know who work in technical education that because of the chromebook-ifcation of grade school, fewer high schoolers are fluent in directory structure and other basics to being good with computers.
The thing that makes me back off a bit from saying that computer literacy is just like literacy as a skill, is that what it means to use and be good with computers is dramatically changing every 5-10 years. What it means to learn to read is not, even if we read more short form and less long form than we used to, the basics of phonics haven't changed. With tech we seem to constantly be moving up to higher and higher levels of abstraction and what's going on under the hood is increasingly blurred.