I also teach computer science (part-time adjunct, I have a regular industry job too), so the quality of computer literacy in the incoming student body is on my mind pretty regularly. This has been especially troublesome when teaching operating systems, because the OS is the deepest layer in the pile of abstractions students have to peel-back over the course of their CS education. The pile of abstractions is only getting higher - the day is not far off when we have to peel-back the abstraction of "persistent data generally" in terms of files before we can get on to peeling-back the abstraction of files themselves. Or who knows, maybe we'll all abandon the desktop analogy of computing altogether, with it's hierarchies of files and links, to move on to some new purely-graph-theoretical database notion of persistent data. Somebody will still have to talk to the disk controller, however, and I can only imagine how distant that reality will be (and already is) from most students' day-to-day experience with computing.
At the same time, I can see a great equalizing force in all this. Computers have reduced the technical acumen demanded from their users to the point that owning a computer and using a computer and even being a "computer enthusiast" doesn't put you very much ahead of anybody else on-average when it comes to starting out towards becoming a computer scientist. I think this, in combination with that everybody wants to be a software engineer these days, will eventually put us somewhere around the 1970's in relative terms with regards to technical literacy in the cohort of incoming computer science students. This might sound nightmarish to the current establishment, but it has at least a positive side-effect: computer science is getting more accessible because teachers can no longer assume that pupils come from a background of "quasi-technical" computer literacy (again, this is because conventional computer literacy has become decreasingly technical in nature).
I've heard one of the general causes behind the lack of diversity in gender and economic-background in tech workers is, at some point around the mid 1980's, CS instructors started asking of their students tasks like: "Open your editor and type..." and someone in the classroom would raise their hand and ask "Ah, um... what's an `editor'? And by the way, I don't own a computer either" and the instructor's reaction would be to privately advise that student to seek a different major, at best, or open derision at worst.
So I think we're getting away from that, which is at least a way to look at the bright side. It does make the teaching job a bit more challenging.
On a more personal gripe, a minor irritation of late is the number of students who want to do their OS homework in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, instead of even setting up a basic VM.
> On a more personal gripe, a minor irritation of late is the number of students who want to do their OS homework in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, instead of even setting up a basic VM.
That's easy to solve, and can give the students a history lesson.
Give them some tasks that work with ~/con :)
Or you can have them work with files all named the same but differ with case. Windows based machines get "confused".
At the same time, I can see a great equalizing force in all this. Computers have reduced the technical acumen demanded from their users to the point that owning a computer and using a computer and even being a "computer enthusiast" doesn't put you very much ahead of anybody else on-average when it comes to starting out towards becoming a computer scientist. I think this, in combination with that everybody wants to be a software engineer these days, will eventually put us somewhere around the 1970's in relative terms with regards to technical literacy in the cohort of incoming computer science students. This might sound nightmarish to the current establishment, but it has at least a positive side-effect: computer science is getting more accessible because teachers can no longer assume that pupils come from a background of "quasi-technical" computer literacy (again, this is because conventional computer literacy has become decreasingly technical in nature).
I've heard one of the general causes behind the lack of diversity in gender and economic-background in tech workers is, at some point around the mid 1980's, CS instructors started asking of their students tasks like: "Open your editor and type..." and someone in the classroom would raise their hand and ask "Ah, um... what's an `editor'? And by the way, I don't own a computer either" and the instructor's reaction would be to privately advise that student to seek a different major, at best, or open derision at worst.
So I think we're getting away from that, which is at least a way to look at the bright side. It does make the teaching job a bit more challenging.
On a more personal gripe, a minor irritation of late is the number of students who want to do their OS homework in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, instead of even setting up a basic VM.