Don't make assumptions about digital literacy skills

Author: Phil Chambers | Jul 17, 2021 Digital Literacy

On more than a few occasions I have pointed instructors (when I was one) and other designers to an article from 2016 that I found interesting titled: The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think

The summary stands out immediately due to its brazen challenge against conventional wisdom:

Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.

Only 5%? Surely not? What about all that digital native stuff I heard about in the early 2000s? Although that concept was written to explain the supposed skills gap between children at the time (my generation) and their teachers, we are 20 years on from that. A new generation, Gen Z, is now on the scene. What is the gossip about them?

Asking around, you seem to find the opposite opinion: it is now the youngsters who are lacking in these skills that the previous generation, the Millennials or Gen Y, so noticeably aquired.

But were these skills ever truly uniform accross a single generation? Is it the case that the Millennials are sandwiched between the Boomers and Gen Z¹, both of which are lacking in the expected 21st century computing skills?

User comparisons 

In his article, Nielsen discussed the 2016 OECD research into the technology skills of a little over 215,000 people from 33 different countries from 2011–2015. A few important take aways are actually found in the first few paragraphs:

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.

For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider.

There is one more difference between you and the average user that’s even more damaging to your ability to predict what will be a good user interface: skills in using computers, the Internet, and technology in general. Anybody who’s on a web-design team or other user experience project is a veritable supergeek compared with the average population. This not just true for the developers. Even the less-technical team members are only “less-technical” in comparison with the engineers. They still have much stronger technical skills than most normal people.

My point here is not to dwell on research from five years ago and claim that no one knows how to do anything with computers. I had, in fact, already read this in a tongue-in-cheek sarcasm-laden post three-years prior by Marc Scott titled “Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you”. In a seemingly therapeutic rant, he describes his many run-ins with the so-called ‘digital natives’ and their lack of assumed digital skills expected by wider society. There was some predictable backlash to this article when it first came out, and while I enjoyed reading it, my main problem with the title is that it in my experience it is not just age related.

The focus on the youth has been picked up by major news outlets as well. This BBC article from 2015, citing an Australian report, claims that tablets are partially to blame for declining digital literacy skills in some children. The ways users interact with phones and tablets are different to the skills expected in the workplace, “detrimental” to the traditional ways of interacting with computers, but boost the skill of online communication.

What other research is there? 

It does not take much time to find other articles and studies on the same lines. One of them, “Today’s kids might be digital natives — but a new study shows they aren’t close to being computer literate” summarizes the findings of the International Computer and Information Literacy 2018 study:

Results were recently released from the International Computer and Information Literacy 2018 study, and they were sobering: Only 2 percent of students scored at the highest levels implied by digital native status, and only another 19 percent of the 42,000 students assessed in 14 countries and educational systems could work independently with computers as information-gathering and management tools.

As one commenter, claiming to be a teacher, and going by ‘Ragnar’, on the Washington Post article stated:

The curriculum was written from a perspective that the students already knew how to use search engines to obtain information, because they were digital natives. The curriculum allowed for only minimal time to teach how to use the software for citing.
[…]The result was a figurative train wreck.[…]
My students had difficulty researching as they did not exhibit what engineers describe as “fuzzy” logic. The time it took to teach researching consumed both the physical space and the mental space. There was little time and space to teach the software for formatting and citing.

This view of children lacking the kind of thinking required for 21st century digital literacy skills has not gone unnoticed by various governments around the world. Often though, there is a push for classrooms to focus on programming or more colloquially ‘coding’ to fix this issue. A programmer would usually have the problem solving experience, and this would help out, but there is more to it than this.

Digital literacy is not simply programming 

With the ease of modern operating systems and easily locatable applications installed with a tap from a single application store, it is unlikely that many users going forward will be used to the kinds of digital literacy skills required from users in the 90s. All major operating systems have one-stop shops now for approved applications - especially those running macOS and iOS devices. Windows has the Windows store, and as for Linux users, while Linux has long had package managers to install programs, I would firmly categorize most of them as highly compotent right off the bat.

The issues, however, run a lot deeper than this. By most metrics I have researched, to be considered digitally literate, there are a set of required foundational skills. These are applied across basically every aspect of computer usage. Things like:

• Being able to look up how to solve problems instead of just giving it to tech support in your school or office.
• Understanding universal shortcuts system-wide, across different applications.
• General knowledge of expected behaviors across applications and devices.
• The confidence to try out solutions to problems, knowing that if anything breaks, you can fix it and return to the current state.²

Very few things that people require IT support to solve involve the technician coding or programming a new application. It is their prior experience of finding solutions to problems that sets them apart.

As an example of how these foundational skills travel across to different devices, here is a personal anecdote.
I recently purchased an air purifier. A pretty simple to understand piece of technology with a power button and fan speed controls. The interface also has a child lock on it to prevent children changing settings or turning the device off. When you press this button like the rest, however, nothing happens. Now, I could have looked at the instructions to see how this button worked differently to the others. I could have declared it ‘broken’ and sent the product back or just lived with it. Instead, I just tried something by myself, confident that what I was doing wasn’t going to break the device (at least not beyond my ability to fix). I knew from using other devices that child locks often require additional pressure, time, or direction to activate/disable them. Eliminating the obvious method of directional change on this touch pad interface, I decided to just press and hold the lock icon for 5 seconds to see if it would do anything. After the 5 seconds, the lock icon lit up and no other buttons worked. I pressed and held it again for another 5 seconds, and the lock icon’s light switched off. I didn’t need to speak to anyone or even read the instructions because I had experience on other devices with similar features that carried over to this new one.

A new normal? 

For many users, gone are the days of scouring the Internet for a niche application and going through the process of downloading it, opening the installer, and following through with the installation wizard. They no longer have to select which drive or folder onto which the program (or “app”) will be installed. It is all done for them.

In fact, on macOS, this manual program installation is often switched off by default, requiring users to manually override the system settings.

A screenshot from macOS showing the Gatekeeper technology allowing only applications from the App Store and trusted, identifed developers. In the case of unsigned applications, the user has to manually bypass even more security measures despite macOS's many warnings.

Do you know how to do this? If you do, welcome to the 5%. Will your learners all be from that top 33%, or highest 5%? That is almost certainly not going to be the case. Taking into account the OECD study linked above, this realization should have an effect on how we as Instructional Designers think about designing courses going forward.

Thoughts for course design 

Nielsen’s take away conclusion that I have followed since 2016 was this:

Keep it extremely simple, or two thirds of the population can’t use your design.

I try to apply this thinking to my design process with Subject Matter Experts. When we are creating an assignment or some sort of process for producing work, it is helpful to consider how learners with different digital literacy skills will handle the task.

Is it too complicated? Are there too many steps? Should there be guides for this particular tool or process? Will other instructors need a guide for this if the SME is not teaching the course?

Consider the learners involved - do some research into the typical learner backgrounds if you can in the early stages of the build. Even some minimal background info on expected learner profiles will help to inform your decision making.

Sure, you would expect Computer Science graduate students to be able to locate and install software by searching the Internet, but can all university students do this without a detailed guide? One might initially think so, but then again it is best not to assume the digital literacy skills of your learners.

References 

1. BBC. (2015). Tablets ‘eroding’ children’s digital skills.

2. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. International Computer and Information Literacy 2018 study.

3. Nielsen, J. (2016). The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think. Nielsen Norman Group, Accessed from: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/.

4. OECD (2016), Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills , OECD Skills Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, France.

5. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001).

6. Scott, M. (2013). Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you. coding2learn.org blog.

7. Strauss, V. (2019). Today’s kids might be digital natives — but a new study shows they aren’t close to being computer literate, Washington Post.