It is four years since I taught a course requiring students to use computers for more than word processing.  That was a stats and scientific inference course to final year zoologists in Edinburgh, Scotland, which I taught for almost a decade.  The experience then was that a significant minority of the students would have trouble even loading their data into the analysis package. 

Today’s discussion with IT whiz Chris suggests young people have really come on.  He asserts that a generation raised on Facebook does not need me to treat them like computer imbeciles [I wondered if he was politely implying I was the imbecile].   Well, we should know by the end of next week.   We are building this course around three separate web-based platforms.  That would have been at least two too many when I last taught.