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I teach at a liberal arts college and in most of my classes I devote a day or two to researching and evaluating sources. I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this?

Their K-12 teachers are telling them this. Rather than actually teach kids how to evaluate information, it's easier to just give a set of rules. The kids are given a "rubric," which is basically a glorified worksheet, with precise details on exactly what's required. The rubric has to be precise enough that there's no way for a student to dispute the grade that they receive.

The question is not which website is credible, but what you can get away with on a paper.

THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files.

My kids are in 9th and 11th grades, respectively. When they were in grade school, we still needed to have MS Word in the house, because some of the teachers would freeze if a file wasn't in .docx format. Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed.

Today, Word is a thing of the past. The kids do everything in the cloud, and the teachers have mostly figured it out. The last remaining uses of MS Word will be in academia, for manuscripts, and in business, for documents that nobody ever reads.

> Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed.

The reason for these rules is not related to printing. These rules are in place to enable fair grading:

- fixed font styling and page margins allow proper comparison of paper lengths (e.g. a student might try to use a bigger font size or bigger margins to get around a "submit 3 pages of text on issue xxx")

- fixed line height requirements allow teachers to print out the submitted document and annotate it - the resulting prints and the correction marks are usually archived to make disputes easier

I don't buy this. Everyone had different handwriting in the good old days, and this did not make grading unfair.

They used something called word count.

I suspect it actually did make grading unfair. Having pretty handwriting probably got you a better grade. Although, arguably it also made the writing more valuable, for instance if someone were ever going to write things like business letters.

Similarly, I was in college when word processing was introduced, and I think that turning in lengthy and typographically perfect term papers probably boosted my GPA. Thanks to doing lots of programming, I could sling text like nobody's business.

The other day I bought a backpack at a skateboard shop and a girl working there said she didn't own a laptop -- just a smartphone. I can absolutely see this becoming common in the near future as phones become even more useful. With a chromecast you can even watch netflix without a laptop, which takes away the main use I have for one aside from coding.

Or the Netflix app on their smart TV, things like that will only get more common.

I already do everything except for programming on an iPad and iPhone. I can program on the iPad (by sshing into a digital ocean droplet) but it's not quite good enough for me to use exclusively. I'd happily give up using a laptop if I could make programming work comfortably for me.

If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop. A phone is basically just a smaller tablet.

> If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop.

That's an interesting perspective. I've always thought of phones and tablets as being mostly collections of tools that are either specialized or focused on remote access. Almost everything that I do on my touchscreen devices relies on network access, to some degree or another.

Until I can install arbitrary software on my phone myself from source, I will still have use for a laptop.

What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell.

> What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell.

You can already do this on Android no problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31564123/run-python-in-a...

If you're on Android, install Termux, then apt install python and an editor and you're done. The future is now :)

That's pretty much a Linux installation pretending to be an app. I'd see it as a workaround not a solution.

The underlying problem with android, as touched on in the article, is that your hardware vendor is the administrator of your phone.

Security on Android relies in the idea that who ever built the OS signs it, and any changes to system libraries, with a secret key. That's a lot of control. Couple that with lack of root and its not your phone.

Termux is like saying... 'I wish I owned my flat so I could remodell it how I want " "it is possible to redecorated your rented flat if you only put plasterboard over the walls"

Will solve thier problem, doesn't fix the insidious loss of power over our computerised lives these platforms (Android, Web applications) lead to.

And then Google find some excuse to close down the account and its game over...

I am currently in my bed because I am sick and can absolutely confirm this. I didn't even bother to get my laptop because my smartphone has the YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, and Amazon Video apps on it. Those are enough for me to keep me entertained without needing to have a heavy laptop on my knees, which would also require me to sit.

And since Android 7 has a split screen feature I can have a YouTube video playing while I'm surfing the web. So multitasking isn't just a PC domain anymore.

As soon as I can do work on my phone, all other computers will be pointless.

Imagine your phone with all of the computing power of your current desktop or laptop, with all of the same software too. If you want to work at a desktop, you could have a wireless keyboard, mouse, display, and power. This is all possible today, but the phones aren't quite there, yet.

You might like continuum from Microsoft? https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17280/windows-10-mo...

Yes! If my phone could run Visual Studio and PC games I wouldn't need a desktop.

I think I might rather switch careers. Phones are terrible. They're sort of mostly tolerable when I'm just trying to kill time reading stuff on the web, or type very short messages where correct spelling is unimportant, but try to get any actual work done with a phone and it's an exercise in frustration. In order to fix all the problems with a smartphone that make it such a bad experience, you'd end up with a device that looks pretty much the same as a laptop.

I know plenty of people in their mid to late 20's who don't own real computers and just do everything from their phones. Some of them use a real computer at work but many of them don't. And this is in San Francisco, no less.

> I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this?

I distinctly remember, somewhere around the 8th grade having this exact question and answer on a "How to use computers" quiz. There was also some information about how search engines can't be trusted either (you should use curated website directories!). So who is telling kids this? Their education system, and whoever decided the curriculum to mandate kids learn.

Really? I would have expected to be much, much worse.

If only 10% of your students are having problems with that, it's a pretty good technological aptitude overall.

The worst has got to be ssh keys. Getting students (even Masters Computer Science students) to properly configure and handle ssh keys is the worst ongoing challenge I have.

That's because there are 18 different ways to do it, and different pieces of software use different keys/formats. I can properly set up ssh, but not because it makes any sense.

Similarly I can use git, despite it's best efforts to be inscrutable.

I get that to some degree, and something like PuTTY makes it really unecessarily complicated.

But really, I find that people have trouble running ssh-keygen and then finding the key and sending me the correct one (they'll often send the private key, or more likely they'll send me both "just use the one you need".)

Oddly, to me, the full PuTTY suite is way easier to use then all the ssh stuff on Linux. PuTTYgen/Pageant makes ssh private keys just work, PuTTYgen also has the handy "open a private key, here's your public key for it" text box, that makes everything dirt obvious (of course you can export the public key as well.) And the other major SSH-based software I use (WinSCP) integrates with Pageant as well. I know all this stuff would be equally simple with Linux, but on Linux, there seems to be "use a single key" thing, whereas I prefer to have multiple keys for personal and work use, which Pageant makes trivial.

Not just students - I experience this in the workplace too, and it just boggles my mind. We hired a recent grad, and after about 10 days of watching him type a password into a terminal ~20 times a day I casually mention how he can use ssh keys. His response? No, I'm not interested in that.

> They were putting the url into google.

Do note that on, at least, mobile Chrome, the Chrome "omnibox" is actually rendered as the Google search page's search box. Typing addresses "into Google" is how you get the browser to navigate to them. If that's the only browser you've ever used, it would be quite a surprise to find that on the school computers, the Google search box is just a search box, and there's another box up at the top of the browser window you have to use for URL entry instead.

I was taught in ~5th grade that you can trust a ".org, .gov, or .edu" website when looking for sources. (This was in a Massachusetts public school)

Did .org ever have any oversight?

not exactly - but your used to be able to more-or-less count on it being owned/operated by a non-profit of some kind