Finally someone who is sane & smart
So the argument is that because Chromebooks just work and don’t need troubleshooting unlike windows so this is Googles fault
OK
No, the argument is that Chromebooks are so limited in what they can offer that kids never learned to do anything out of using the chrome browser.
Turns out you don’t need to worry about troubleshooting something if you just remove that functionality lol
They don’t need to know how computers work if Chromebooks are the only thing in existence.
They also don’t need to know how to deal with python dependencies if they can pace their code into AI and say why isn’t tkinter working?
Craftsmrn said the same thing about the industrial revolution.
You know how you know even less about computers? When you cannot afford one at all
That’s honestly technology in a nutshell. Technological development leads to further abstraction, leading to less low level knowledge. It’s always been this way. Is AI an abstraction step too far, or are we just the next generation of old man yelling at cloud?
This seems silly. Lots of kids never learned about computers even when they were available. A chromebook was just an electronic school aid. If the interest was in computers they would learn about computers.
I think this is a fairly dumb take. In the schools that I saw that had chromebooks a kid might be taking English, Math, AND computing. It really was up to the school (and parents) to introduce computing, not the machine that was the general replacement for books.
Anecdotally: a high school near us requires every student to have a computer. They do not hand out chromebooks and the requirement specs are a higher end Mac or PC laptop that the kids are required to bring to classes. These kids use blender, maya 3d, office suite, video and music editing software for example. They absolutely do not know any more about computers then chromebook kids (with a few exceptions). Having access to a computer doesnt magically make them know about how computers work.
The real take is to get kids into PC gaming from a young age. Kids are super patient with each other and now my kid is doing things like installing mods for games that he plays. It’s also massively improved his reading which is mostly how I learned English myself.
I can thank Minecraft for making me learn how to use the computer because I wanted to install mods and for learning English because Minecraft let’s plays were like crack to 10 year old me and basically all of them were in English
Not with chrimebooks, with android
Nah
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of big corporations, but Schools are gonna have to be using Device Management programs regardless of what OS they use (so that kids don’t play video games, or use social media, or watch adult videos, in the classroom). Giving kids a Managed Windows Laptop with tons of restrictions does nothing to “improve tech literacy” either, so just as bad as a chrombook.
Also, wealth is also a factor. If you only have money for one device, and everyone has a smartphone, and you kids are gonna get socially ostricized in school for not having one, of course you’re gonna prioritize giving them a smartphone first, which in turn, delays them learning how to use a computer, and I mean like a computer you actually own and can modify however you want, as opposed to the school-owned managed device. (Its harder to learn that when you’re older)
I am pretty confident it’s the smartphone OSs (Android and iOS) that are more at fault. I remember having to install a file browser on my smartphone. Kids grown up with smartphones may not even know there are files and folder structures.
Yeah, and I feel like you could play around with javascript to make stuff happen in the browser on a chrome book, can’t you?
I’m old enough that it was BASIC I played around with when I was a kid. Not a language I ever used since, but the important thing is to get a feel for logic, make some incredibly stupid choices when making a program and learn from that. If a kid wants to play around on a computer to make it do something they created, I think they’ll find a way.
Also AI can be helpful when starting on a new language. Yeah I had to learn the hard way by googling stuff and getting the syntax wrong, and using a lot of guess work. There’s still a learning curve before you just know the syntax without stopping to think or asking the AI, but it was that way before, it was just googling things you gotta do before you really know it. And before that a lot more trial and error to figure it out.
Back in my day we brought our own MS-DOS boot disks to school to circumvent all the limitations.
For me it was Backtrack Linux on a bootable CD-RW. Set the Windows wallpaper as my background and nobody ever noticed. Man those were the days!
chromebooks suck but this isn’t really why
Thank you. It started long before chromebooks were a thing. If anything, we can blame it on windows. I remember people of my generation not understanding any tech from the mid 90s on…
People have not understood tech forever, but the 90s and '00s probably had the highest rate of tech literacy. Modern OSes obfuscate the inner workings more than they used to, meaning everyday users are less exposed to them.
They’re all to blame
I feel like this has way more to do with smartphones and apple than chromebooks but sure.
I work in education. The chromebooks at my school replaced the convential computer lab where kids would learn how to actually use the computer.
I graduated highschool in 2014. Very interesting that you think schools taught students how to use a computer beyond opening a browser, Microsoft word, and typing.
Wtf was up with microsoft word class? It’s designed for you to learn within 3 weeks. They had children spend 3 hours a week for about a whole year using word.
Like damn, show the other software too. I knew so many science nerds that would appreciate a week of KStars lessons.
Chromebooks are much more locked down than MacBooks.
I was suspecting they were indicating iPads
Yeah, my kid’s school has iPads for their technology classes. At least they’re still teaching them the old school internet paranoia I was taught.
Exactly, otherwise this problem would be almost exclusive to places that had this Chromebook program. Brazil as a whole had no such program, yet lots of people have no fucking clue what to do on phones besides “install app, run app”
Yeah a decade ago is not where this problem started. Nothing points to these Chromebooks. Smart phones are a good choice but also just the homogenization of the internet from like 2005-2012 as kids stopped having to figure out how to navigate the internet and install programs, instead staying on two to three websites and everything being installed as an app.
I just bought one of these for $35 dollars and put Linux mint on it
$35 is impressive. My old Chromebook cost $80.
I just searched “cheap old laptop” on Amazon. Probably got lucky tho
This is kinda a bad take imo. I don’t think it’s chrome books that has ruined tech literacy. Maybe it’s younger exposure to even more addictive social media than previous generations?
I’m pretty young. My first mobile device was an iPod touch 4th gen. I figured out how to jailbreak it and I was like 12 at the time. If I ever felt one of these walled garden devices was holding me back, I enjoyed finding a creative solution around that. Since that iPod touch, I jailbroke my Wii and recently a kindle. I also modded a gameboy, but that was different than jailbreaking.
Yeah it’s a fucking abysmal take. More kids had access to the internet and computers because of Chromebooks, without them they’d have had nothing - maybe once an hour in the computer lab each week, assuming they even had one.
Prior to Chromebooks, the most a school could do was “a computer in every classroom”. That was it, that was the ambition in the early 2000’s and even then most schools failed.
What happened was tech companies made computers easier to use by hiding a lot of that complexity. And average humans were fine with that because shit should just work.
The arguments being raised here about a loss of skills are the same arguments boomers used against millennials because they didn’t know how to do DIY and shit like that.
The blame is always squarely on the education system. That system is supposed to set kids up with the skills they need to make it in the wold and tech literacy is one of many, many areas that is hugely underserved.
were fine with that because shit should just work.
This was Apple’s literal marketing campaign when they were trying to make Macs popular again
And say what you will about apple, it worked (the slogan, not the Macs)
Before Chromebooks we had one aging computer lab that the entire school had to reserve and share. Kids never even learned to type. I was able to improve students typing ability before they hit High School.
Because we had Chromebooks (that I raised money for with fundraisers) my students were able to learn to use digital data logging of science experiments using probes, my students were able to learn to design websites, I was able to teach them programming basics using Scratch, I was able teach kids basic IT management since I created a team of kids to assist with tech problems students and teachers had with their technology. I taught them CAD with TinkerCAD, I taught them video editing, I taught them image editing, etc.
Chromebooks were amazing.
Not to mention that Chromebooks are Linux (so can be modded for basically anything), but these days have official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please. All it takes is a flashed USB drive and one button click, then you’re totally unrestricted and out of ChromeOS.
If any kid wanted to, they could do that far easier than I could when I was in school. If they become adults, buy a Chromebook, and choose to do nothing with it other than watch YouTube, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the technology that was provided to them during school.
official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please.
I thought you had to remove a write protect screw and flash a custom firmware.
Have they stopped that now?
The school doesn’t let you do that. Because if you installed Linux you could install games, and then you might get distracted. Never mind the fact that YouTube is still completely available.
I looked into this back when I was in school and there was some weird workaround found by someone on reddit that essentially forced it to do a complete factory reset. I didn’t want to get in trouble for doing that, and if I did that I wouldn’t have been able to connect to the wifi anymore.
Do you mean like booting off Linux or installing it? I was looking at installing Linux on Chromebooks and apparently it really depends on the model. Some have a physical screw that you open up the laptop and unscrew to install Linux.
What are the advantages of a jailbroken kindle? I’ve thought about it but there isn’t really anything I lack on mine.
My motivation was mostly to ditch Amazon, but in the process I discovered ko reader is both better than Amazon’s reader and does a really good job turning PDFs into readable books.
What did you jailbreak your ipod with, though? Was it a chromebook?
Probably windows 🤮
I think there were jailbreaks that could be done on device, but if I remember correctly this wasn’t one of them. I forget the exact year/iOS version. I wanna say I jailbroke 3 iOS versions in a row, and at that point new things had captured my interest. Eventually I found myself captivated with frontend development.
You can find my latest work at https://blorpblorp.xyz/, the obviously best client for Lemmy and soon PieFed.
So you had access to a fairly open device, where the system was considerably less restrictive than a Chromebook. Apparently many first time users don’t have that luxury any longer. They’re stuck with phones and chromebooks (phones with a keyboard slapped on, really). Good luck hacking anything with that locked up shit.
Someone else pointed out it’s not that difficult to boot Linux on your Chromebook off a thumb drive. A quick search shows it might be slightly complicated but seems pretty doable depending on your model.
Listen I hate Google, but this still seems like a dumb take. There are better things to criticize them for: illegal monopolization of search through anticompetitive practices, making their search product worse on purpose, having no respect for people’s privacy, literally removing their slogan to not be evil, etc).
I just see it as another item on a long list.
You know what, we probably agree on most of that list. And I’m happy we have Lemmy.
As I said above, schools don’t let you do that on their Chromebooks. Of course they could provide the same restrictions on other computers probably, so idk if blaming Google is the correct move.
Although they would have to go as far as not allowing any external executables for it to be that locked down.
I jailbroke my Wii
Yeah I’ve done this too. Beyond easy. There’s literally a website with step-by-step instructions. I imagine it’s the same for Kindle, etc.
Googling how to jailbreak something is not the same as having an open and functional development environment.
You don’t need to have a dev environment in order to be considered “tech literate”.
Just as a single example, an issue I’ve seen is that kids may not even understand what a file system is or how it works, because they’re used to apps like Facebook or Google Drive which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc. Then they grow up putting photos on instagram, writing essays on Microsoft Word, and to them it’s some unexplained internet magic. They never had first-hand experience with creating and modifying files on a local file system, and so they lack the understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes.
may not even understand what a file system is or how it works … which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc.
What’s funny is, filesystems, folders, file extensions are already abstractions, there is nothing inherently “right” about those particular abstractions, it’s just what we’ve used for 40 some years… Before that, you might just have blocks on a disk, or a linear stream on a tape, and it was up to you to figure out what went where, and how to find it again. Point being, it’s all just a sea of bits, regardless of how you organize them- the goal is to organize them in a way that you can forget the sea of bits.
Eh, I don’t really agree.
To want to learn something starts with curiosity and the willingness to learn. I was always trying to fuck around with games and programs before I knew that modding was even a thing. When I was met with restrictions I always tried breaking them. I got around admin protection on school computers that literally only had access to the desktop.
My youngest brother on my dad’s side (my family is complicated) is a shut-in who barely acts like the adult he’s supposed to be, never owned a chromebook, and sits in front of the computer more than I even do. He is incredibly tech illiterate.
Yeah it’s a pretty bad take IMHO. When I was a kid we had one 386 desktop computer running MS-DOS. No laptops, phones or tablet. I always liked computers and when I went to high school I noticed a bunch of old broken computers in a storage room one day. Asked the computer teacher (we had computer classes learned MS Word and (blind) typing) if I could try to fix them. Me and a friend spend many luch breaks swapping parts, until about half of them worked again. Learning about something is mostly your willingness to learn. As a highschool kid I would have loved to get a laptop. If I had a Chromebook I’m fairly sure I would have tried to run a custom OS on it or see what else non standard thing I could have unlocked.
If a kid is working with a 600mhz CPU in 2025, what can they realistically do with that Chromebook other than figure out how to get past a firewall? I remember 2nd hand stories of kids bringing in USBs with cracked minecraft or quake, or screwing around with windows themeing and other nonsense. Now, thats gone. You get a browser, and a file manager. No themes, sometimes no access to even change the wallpaper, all in googles little sandbox. I think this post is somewhat accurate but leaves out the role iPhones play in tech ilitteracy
This is an incredibly dumb take. Tech isn’t one dimensional and there isn’t a “right” path to tech literacy. I grew up on Windows and I learned a lot of what I know by exploring my laptops and learning new things out of necessity. I ended majoring in CS in working in tech. My sister, who’s 5 years younger than me, had Chromebooks growing up both at home and at school, yet she’s also a very proficient CS major. Using Chromebooks doesn’t show that someone is bad at tech, that’s just a baseless assumption.
Chromebooks are just another branch of tech, and there’s really nothing wrong with them. They’re basically Android tablets in laptop form. Google giving them to schools at a deeply discounted price is not a bad thing. Without them, many schools wouldn’t have any sort of tech for their kids to work with. Chromebooks are incredibly useful tools that can enable teachers to incorporate material from the internet into their lessons and help streamline their work.
Hating on things for the sake of hating on them is just lazy and counterproductive. There’s a lot to criticize Google for, Chromebooks are not one of them.
Being a CS major (even a good one) isn’t a solid measure of tech literacy. CS still suffers from the “do this arbitrary thing so you can get credit”; along with other majors and American schools at large.
Actually I’ve seen first hand the dumbing down of curriculum in my CS program via my younger peers’ stories, and helping them with their coursework. And it’s 100% due to low tech literacy.
Edit: grammar.
Not Android, Linux. I was trying to figure out why there are so few Android tablets and read that Google didn’t have complete control with Android. That’s why Samsung and HTC and others put their own overlay on it. They didn’t want that for laptops/bigger devices, so for ChromeOS they locked it down and told the hardware manufacturers “no, it’s ChromeOS. You can’t fiddle with it. If you want to make Chromebooks, these are the minimum specs and this is the keyboard you must use. If not, fuck off.”
These kind of takes have the usual format of “anything a company does is bad” and is profit driven. They forget that there is something called marketing and optics behind it.
I think my kids are more accepting of Linux on the family PC because of their school chrome books. We’ll see how it plays out when they start purchasing their own devices though.
I completely agree. The OP ignores the fact that Chromebooks run on Linux, and are essentially a gateway to it. There’s even official support for sideloading any Linux distro of choice.
Have you ever used a chromebook?
Yes, it was a 2013 Chromebook and even back then they had these features
The Chromebooks that kids use at school aren’t going to have Linux on them, nor will they have a useful terminal? The operating system abstractions kids learn with Chromebooks are basically useless
The Windows computers I used in school were locked down too, no terminal access or even basic settings. Google wants them to grow up and buy their own Chromebooks, and my point is that it is accessible then.
Of course, it forces just the worst window manager.
