I'm going to offer you some pure, unscientific qualitative research to forward this hypothesis: a vast majority of students entering college can download songs onto an mp3 player, maintain a Facebook/mySpace page, and put a video on YouTube; however, many of them lack some foundational, basic computer skills.
Take this gem for example:
A student in our office a while back was having trouble saving a document. She asked me for help. I came over to see why she was having trouble saving Word files, sending them and retrieving them. I had her walk me through how she saves something. I kid you not, what I found out is that she was saving documents with file names of like 50 words. This one was "Planetarium story with an interview with Dr. XX about the Mars viewing that will happen on March 24 and 25 at the planetarium on campus."
I tell you, I was stunned, absolutely stunned she had made it all the way to being a sophomore in college before someone pointed this out to her.
And I've had to help a couple of students select a different printer, as my doodle above illustrates.
Then, in some of my online graduate courses, we have people who pleaded ignorance for every assignment. "I do not know how to attach files to e-mail." "I do not know how to save something as an 'rtf' versus a Word file" (even after the professor posted directions). For one of my courses, we started off with a meeting in a computer lab. The lady next to me asked me how to click on a program to open it. She followed that with a question about where to type the address in the browser window.
Think about it, why are you taking an online course when you can barely use a computer?
So now it comes to my current graduate course, which is about social media marketing. The professor had put up a wiki for the class to load assignments onto, comment about others' work, add tags, etc.
He said it himself in class last week: this has been a failure. People are not logging onto it or using it at all.
I say this to show that despite the fact some people think today's students are tech geniuses, many are not.
The great thing about Web 2.0, Web services, etc. is that they create tools so anyone who knows how to click a mouse can make a Web page, create a video, connect with friends, etc.
And that's great!
But I see two things happening:
And I also feel it necessary to say that I am by no means a Web expert or computer guru. So in many cases, I may be one of the ignorant masses my IT readers deal with every day.
I tell you, I was stunned, absolutely stunned she had made it all the way to being a sophomore in college before someone pointed this out to her.
And I've had to help a couple of students select a different printer, as my doodle above illustrates.
Then, in some of my online graduate courses, we have people who pleaded ignorance for every assignment. "I do not know how to attach files to e-mail." "I do not know how to save something as an 'rtf' versus a Word file" (even after the professor posted directions). For one of my courses, we started off with a meeting in a computer lab. The lady next to me asked me how to click on a program to open it. She followed that with a question about where to type the address in the browser window.
Think about it, why are you taking an online course when you can barely use a computer?
So now it comes to my current graduate course, which is about social media marketing. The professor had put up a wiki for the class to load assignments onto, comment about others' work, add tags, etc.
He said it himself in class last week: this has been a failure. People are not logging onto it or using it at all.
I say this to show that despite the fact some people think today's students are tech geniuses, many are not.
The great thing about Web 2.0, Web services, etc. is that they create tools so anyone who knows how to click a mouse can make a Web page, create a video, connect with friends, etc.
And that's great!
But I see two things happening:
- Because everything is so easy, people don't have to learn to understand some of the technology behind it. This can lead to major problems if something goes wrong or someone needs to do something a big more complex.
- Because everything is easy, it's given the implication that it's trivial, light-hearted, not serious, etc. People become used to using these tools in their personal life, but they do not translate those skills when it comes to using something for a class or work.
And I also feel it necessary to say that I am by no means a Web expert or computer guru. So in many cases, I may be one of the ignorant masses my IT readers deal with every day.
Posts
5 comments:
Girl... you're so right. Lotsa people only know how to use Web 2.0. They have no idea how things work under the surface.
This is true of Web 2.0, Web 1.0, Windows, DOS, and earlier eras of using the computer.
I started using computers with the Apple II back in 1977 when I was eight. I've had about three dozen computers since then.
I don't work with computers anymore. I'm a high-end personal escort. I like the point that you make in this post.
Candi Ryles
A Microsoft representative was giving a presentation on campus recently. One of the things he was promoting was their tool for creating mash-ups. (I forgot its name. It looked snazzy, but requires the MS equivalent of Flash, which I haven't got installed, and it also looked somewhat limited)
Along the way, he pointed out that all the talk of "digital natives" that is going around is a bit misleading: Students may be digitally native, but only with tools which are hyper-intuitive and easy to use. User interfaces that are very much designed around people, to make things as easy as possible for as many people as possible. Their understanding of technology is thus actually going backwards, compared to a few years ago. It's just that technology is getting more forgiving / people friendly. (Of course, this means that if something is a little more complex, or not a hugely frequent task, and no one has uber-simplified it yet, the so-called "digital natives" are helpless and baffled and often entirely useless....)
Thanks for posting, Candi and Robert. I appreciate you taking the time to post and thanks for visiting the blog.
Candi, wow, you are totally kicking it old school with the Apple II. That brings back memories.
Robert, you bring up some really good points. Namely, with digital natives' decreasing intelligence, it makes us all the more dependent on those who truly know technology. No wonder computer engineerings, scientists and tech support folks make so much dough and always are among the best industries for job growth and retention. It'll be like that SNL skit of Nick, your company's computer guy, all over again!
I agree with you. Being a digital native does not at all mean that the person knows how to problem solve or (my pet peeve) organize anything.
I'm horrified by how many people use del.icio.us and have 8 million tags, none of them grouped or bundled. These are the same people that save all their word documents to their desktop or My Documents folder and scroll through all of them each and every time they are looking for something. Age has nothing to do with it, I think some people just don't like to delve below the surface use of most tools (web2.0 or otherwise.)
I agree - I worked for one of the big tech companies a year ago as a summer student, and I was amazed that many of my co-workers kept coming to me for advice and suggestions once they saw me use a couple of time-saving shortcuts. By this, I just mean simple things like keyboard shortcuts in Lotus Notes, or various time-saving Linux shell commands. It really hit home when I was asked to help re-configure the departmental webserver, which had run into problems. People do what's intuitive, or (if all else fails) maybe read the instructions.
Post a Comment