[quote=Diego Mamani]I’ll tell you an anecdote from my years in grad school here in California. We had undergraduate students who had been exposed to computers and high technology literally since Kindergarten or earlier. However, the students struggled and had a really hard time learning to use Excel and the like.
On the other hand, we had foreign grad students that had only very limited exposure to computers in their college years (this was almost 20 years ago). [/quote]Umm. time-line problem for college undergrads 20yrs ago. 2012 – 20years = 1992. Back about another 20 for year of birth brings it to 1972. Forward to Kindergarten 5 to 6 years.. brings 1978 or so. I don’t think there was even wide spread availability of computers in 1978. IBM came out with the first Luggable in 1975 (IBM 5100).. for $8,000 to $19,000 – a very big sum in those days. Most high schools didn’t even have computers available to them, much less individual homes. The High School I attended was one of the rare one’s who did.. in 1975 (oops, dating myself here). This was the first system I learned to program (Not Basic, the other language that was available on that machine)
There is a ‘current’ problem being noticed where many college undergrads who were ‘exposed’ to computers in the home while growing up, don’t have the ‘expected’ knowledge of them when they enter College. That is because ‘exposure’, ie watching videos, playing games.. is not the same as using a computer as a tool. This problem is exacerbated by the ‘MTV’ generation’s 15 second concentration duration.
