Day: August 21, 2011

We Need Computer Literacy

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

First, I made an idiot out of myself when I told our IT people that “the body of the computer is missing from my classroom.” It turns out that an Apple computer has no body apart from the huge monitor. How was a person supposed to know that?

And now I just read an article that made me feel stupid all over again:

 90 percent of people don’t know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page!  “90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands,” Russell said. “I do these field studies and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve sat in somebody’s house as they’ve read through a long document trying to find the result they’re looking for. At the end I’ll say to them, ‘Let me show one little trick here,’ and very often people will say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my life!'”

I can’t believe people have been wasting their lives like this either! It makes me think that we need a new type of class in schools across the land immediately. Electronic literacy. Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we’re looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing.

I’m one of those idiots who didn’t know about CTRL+F. When I need to find something, I open the “Find” function on the menu. I just looked and it has CTRL+F right next to it. For some reason, however, I never noticed that and never used this key combination. I always make fun of people who don’t use CTRL+C and CTRL+V to copy and paste, but now it turns out that there are folks who are laughing at my computer illiteracy.

I’m So Sick That. . .

~ Clarissa ~ 21 Comments

. . . I only wrote 3 blog posts yesterday.

. . . I spent 20 minutes staring at photos of Lady Gaga’s meat dress.

. . . there are several kinds of sausage in the house but I’m equally indifferent to all of them.

. . . it took me three tries to write the word “indifferent” correctly in the previous sentence.

. . . I haven’t been able to unpack the suitcase I came home with on Tuesday night.

. . . I read a colleague’s email twice but still have no idea what he is saying.

. . . I haven’t gone for my daily walk in 3 days.

. . . my husband has to make my tea because I’m too weak to do it.

. . . I didn’t talk to my sister on the phone.

. . . I forgot to eat.

. . . I started to find all the posts in my blogroll to be too complex for my understanding.

. . . all I want is for this stupid virus to leave me alone already!