Pardon me, I *was* teasing, dear Muhammad Abd al-Hameed.
But I would maintain some skepticism re "demands of present-day
(office) conditions". Sure these imply a secretary/clerk being able
to type into the Win95/8-Office suite v17.x.028b; but having learnt
just that he/she will be lost with v17.x.029a - which is exactly the
situation lots of clerical employees around here (in well-off EUrope,
with social security and all) are in, and why they are layed-off.
The office monoculture may even prove worse, in that respect, than
industrial assembly line work.
Someone who learns to type with WnWord_8 will have later only greater
learning problems to understand the differences between, say, editing,
layout, importing data (or eMailing, for that part - I play all sorts
of "educative" games with some of my online-newbie friends or
colleagues on this line, and some of them may "never learn"; in fact they
have basic dificulties of understanding and thus, no access to
learning, highly qualified as they may be).
I think we are not too far apart on the meaning of words - you write:
> By literacy, I really mean literacy - ability to use a personal computer for
> most elementary tasks, especially word processing. You may call it
> somewhat equivalent to learning to use the typewriter.
Good comparison - only with WinWord_8.b17d you see very little of what
the machine does, and trained use of such an application has a rather
short shelf life. "Functional literacy" - the term used by UNESCO for
instance - imply some learning, most important to learn the ability of
learning. Which is what certain technologies *inhibit*, and are even
*disigned* for to inhibit.
In that respect, your
> young people, who are desperate even for entry level clerical jobs
are in not much different a situation than the academic, high-qualified
people who run an NGO here for North/South cooperation and the promotion
of the Sahel farmers - they lack the very literacy to see how their
brand-new iMac's churn out their little notes of 3.4 KB as 180+ KB files
to some 400+ Eddressees (though most of them safely north of the
Sahara), and are desparate why they get so poor response from the
Timbuktu suburbs.
// Heimo Claasen // <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // Brussels 1999-09-14
HomePage of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.inti.be/hammer
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