Thanks for all the replies. Lots of things to discuss with her. I’ll show her the whole thread sometime over the weekend. There seems to be no real consensus, which is a good thing. There are points in favour of both views.
I think my background is influencing my views (duh!). My mum was a secretary, for a few large firms, and secretary was a very good job. She was a touch typist, and wrote shorthand. I think when I graduated from University and took a job as a “secretary” for a couple of years, she was very pleased with my career prospects! I’m not sure what she thought of my becoming an administrator and then a technician. Probably glossed over it in her mind, as I’d already had the best job there was to be had in the world.
I think my mum’s memory of what she used to do, and the actual fact of me being an office junior were worlds apart. And I could never type or do shorthand. Typing wasn’t a problem – word processors autocorrect spelling mistakes, or at least underline stuff for you. Shorthand was never used by anyone where I was.
UncleEbenezer wrote:OP: if she talks of typing, maybe you should seize on it and float the idea of learning touch-typing? Express it something along the lines of "real" or "expert" typing? If she bites, it's potentially a life skill. If not, nothing lost.
Nah. Not happening. I’ve suggested it before, and apparently it’s a BAD IDEA. Furthermore, I think I had too much exposure to keyboards before my mum suggested such a thing, so even though I did a few courses from books or online, I was already in bad habits. I don’t want to forbid the small one to use the computer until she does it “properly”, particularly when I don’t!
I fear you’ve suggested I suggest other things before (writing html in Vim?) and I had the same reply. That time, I did actually give it a go, but she ended up trying to write a script in Vim for a game she thought she could code in bash. Very imaginative, but I was completely lost with what she was trying to do, and trying to cook dinner. She did have a go at some Javascript in Notepad, and that went down very well for a couple of hours. Library book for the summer reading challenge, and Mummy nowhere in sight (until bugs needed fixing).
gryffron wrote:By the time Loup's 10yo is in employment I suspect she'll be dictating to a perfect voice recognition system, and she'll wonder why anyone ever bothered with keyboards.
While I agree that technology is moving quite quickly, I still write stuff down on paper using a pen. Biro these days rather than quill pen, but still any old scrap of paper I find, to minimize waste. Maybe typing will be obsolete though. But word processing will not, because you might still need to go back an correct stuff you said wrong into the dictating machine. I'm not sure how to say "the third word on line 5 of page 8 should be there, not their" into a dictating machine, particularly when Word has repaginated everything again, just because Bill Gates knows more than I do (he is the multibillionaire, and I am not). And I don't know how the programmers will work, without keyboards.
Anyway, thanks again for all the replies. A lot to chat about with the small one.