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Are College Students Techno Idiots?
ict_geek writes "Are college students techno idiots? Despite the inflammatory headline, Inside Higher Ed asks an interesting question. The article refers to a recent study by ETS, which analyzed results from 6,300 students who took its ICT Literacy Assessment. The findings show that students don't know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can't narrow down an overly broad search, and can't tailor a message to a particular audience. Yikes. According to the article: 'when asked to select a research statement for a class assignment, only 44 percent identified a statement that captured the assignment's demands. And when asked to evaluate several Web sites, 52 percent correctly assessed the objectivity of the sites, 65 percent correctly judged for authority, and 72 percent for timeliness. Overall, 49 percent correctly identified the site that satisfied all three criteria.'" If they are, they're not the only ones.
Clearly this is posted by one of the studies subjects :-)
Yes, they are.
This goes well with my theory that over 50% of human beings are idiots.
*Most* people are terrible at critical reading. Just terrible.
For that matter, most people don't really like to read at all.
What's this article about ?
It's critical thinking skills.
This is nothing new. Decades of teaching to standardized tests and ignoring the thought process in favor of fact regurgitation has led to this.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Like Slashdot.
I'm a student in EE/CprE at a state university, and I like to consider myself somewhat technically literate. I know various programming languages (C, Python, Java, PHP, etc), I know things about hardware design... the basics.
This article pointed out to me one thing - that I've never taken a formal class on how to use the internet. I suppose some of us 'just figure it out' and others don't.
The findings link looks like an html document, but it redirects to a PDF file. Neat trick.
No wonder some people are confused over this interweb business ...
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Basically, student answers didn't match up with the supposed "correct" answers. How do you even gauge the "objectivity" of a website, and how do you say somebody's assessment is incorrect? I don't think we have to worry about our college students. I'm sure pretty much all of them can utilize technology much more effectively than their parents can.
Real conversation
Me: What program did you use to download all that pr0n?
Fellow Student: Windows 98
Me: Could you be a little more specific?
Student: Oh, Windows 98 SE
This stuff happens to me seemingly everyday. Don't even get me started on the argument I had with a CIS student over whether USB 2.0 is better than USB 1.1
Are College Students Techno Idiots?
If, by "college students," we mean "most college students," just like we mean "most people" when we ask, "are people techno idiots?"
Honestly, answers to a question like that, in this venue, are going to be so distorted by the abnormal slashdot nerd density as to be meaningless when talking about a wider demographic. My personal experience with most college students is that they are just as much in the "it's just magic, and it works" (as well as the "my computer is so slow! it won't even run the new free stuff I download any more!") camp as the average non-college-student person.
The "technical" stuff with which they're comfortable (as in, feel mastery thereof) are the dedicated-purpose devices that don't really let you hose them up (phones, cameras, simple MP3 players, etc). But they don't know how or why any of it works any more than they know how or why their car, their democracy, their adrenal glands, or the free WiFi at Panera works. And I'm not just talking about the liberal arts majors.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As a result we developed an information literacy class that is a required component for taking a Distance Learning class, and it is of course contained within our (home grown) Distance Learning platform. If you have not passed IL, you can't get to any of your other classes.
Because we've got a home grown app, we were able to put in alot of specific things (how to submit an assignment, how to send an email to a specific address, how to upload a file, how to download a file and then find it again). It's the way of things. You can't blame the users if they are incompetent. You either have to ensure they are competent, or block them from using the system, and give them an opportunity to learn and demonstrate their competancy
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Absolutely. The skills described have as much to do with technology as they do to music appreciation. These results are all about critical thinking deficiencies. Or, put another way, proving once again how many people are sheep/lemmings/cattle looking to be led around by the nose.
----- Connection reset by beer
This has nothing to do with technology and is just basically critical thinking and analytical skills
The findings show that students don't know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can't narrow down an overly broad search, and can't tailor a message to a particular audience.
1. Isn't everything on see on the Internet true?
2. Google figures out everything you need to know anyway.
3. U mean thy use txt speech insted of reg typng on tsts?
---
In all seriousness, I'm not surprised by anything these days. I work for a two year college and there are programs that offer money to "college ready" high school students (no remedial work necessary) and there was a HS principal (this week) that when told about the program said, "none of our students would qualify, don't even bother to bring it up."
Why should these studies even worry about topics like this when students aren't even placing into 100/1000 level courses when they "graduate" high school?
I been going to school part-time for the last five years to learn programming. (This is my second tour through college as I got my General Education associate degree in 1994.) A lot of programming students will learn only what the instructors put in front of them. Very few students have the initiative to read or program outside of the classroom. What's taught in the class may meet the academic requirements but I wouldn't try to get a job based on that. I've told recruiters that I understand programming concepts and can read code, but I'm not a programmer per se since I have no actual work experience.
When a woman friend accused me of hacking her Google email filters (not true but it's a long story), I died laughing as I pointed out that I wasn't taught enough at school to become a script kiddie. Besides, if I did hacked Google's email filters, why didn't they offer me a job? Boy, she was pissed.
That's about right. I always see these news stories about the digital generation and generation myspace, etc, etc. They'll show some kid downloading music, chatting on AIM, going on myspace, and playing some game in flash on a website. The parents go on how great he can multitask and how great he is on the computer, blah, blah, blah.
The truth is, many kids just find a few things they really like and latch onto them. They don't really understand any sort of computing fundamentals. They understand how to go on AIM and myspace all day. When faced with a computer intensive task that relies on critical thinking and not just keystroke habits, they fall flat on their face.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
This one with a CS student:
I was discussing different OS's and he is steadfast in his beliefs (even after showing facts otherwise) that:
-Windows XP is based off of DOS (It's actually loosely based on the OS/2 NT project)
-Mac OSX is based off Mac OS 9, and sucks (actually NeXT)
-Palm OS looks like no desktop OS, and therfore sucks
-Unix is crap
and...
-Linux is rooted in DOS
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
...who are so bad at geography they can't find the Earth on a globe. Every once in a while we get reports like that for highschool students. I guess they finally managed to graduate. Then again, average IQ is 100. I got into a casual conversation on the topic one time, and this real idiot girl volunteered here IQ--105. Wow. If that really is "slightly above average", then these studies make a lot of sense.
Most people are great at critical reading, like me.
Reminds me of hooking up a five port switch once for this lady. She points at it and says, "is that the Internet?"
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I'm curious if majors had a significant correlation. At first I'd expect electrical/computer engineering/science majors to fair well. However when you factor in that this is ofter more of a test of research skills and critical thinking, than I can see that helping liberal arts majors as well.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I tried to view the sample questions on their site, but I couldn't...Despite the fact that I have Flash 9, it kept trying to redirect me to "get flash". I'll have to see at least a few of the examples before I regard this study as authoritative.
A study done by PB Inc has found that 92% of Americans have trouble determining if surveys and studies are trustworthy, a figure that has tripled in the past six months.
but I didn't bother reading all of your post.
students don't know how to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, can't narrow down an overly broad search, and can't tailor a message to a particular audience.
Who says they don't fail at reading books as well?
This isn't really about technology. Swap the web sites for
newspaper or magazine articles (or pretty much anything) and
I bet you'll arrive at the same findings...
Most people are just not very "smart". The skills you use
to narrow a search are the same skills you use to debug
software, repair an automobile or determine the correct treatment
for a medical condition... You know, the stuff most people
can't do.
This should not come as any surprise, where most students are from the failed government schooling system, and most colleges are little more than glorified trade schools or propagators of the latest wacky idea en vogue.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I went to a school that ranks in the top five on Wired's Most Wired Campuses list. I work for a company that builds advanced computer systems with capabilities far beyond the average joe's imagination. Since my youngest days I have been surrounded by computers and technologically astute people. All of these intelligent people with vast amounts knowledge and experience yet, when it comes to things like emails, I get nothing but urban legends and forwards, even after I debunk thier tripe with snopes.com. If they need to find something on the internet, they ask me for help.
I think the problem lies not in comprehension ability but in the ability to ask the right question to get what you want. The way people are taught to solve problems in school affects how they solve problems in life. It doesn't help any that so few students actually grasp the idea behind problem solving and even less are any good at actually doing it. Most people see a problem that has a solution or a question that has an answer. If they don't get the right solution, they immediatly think that there is something wrong with that question or problem or how they worked it out. They waste time and energy trying to find thier mistake. In reality, the first thing that should be taught is if you are asking a question and not getting the answer you expected, maybe you are not asking the right question.
To illustrate the point, working in IT, I, like many others, have had an opportunity at one point to have the luxury of operating a help desk hotline. What fun! The most tedious part is getting the clueless user on the other end to get you the information you need to solve thier problem and send them on thier blissfully merry way. I cannot count the number of times I asked a question that seemed entirely sane to me only to recieve the most insane answer from the user that I never expected. At first I would be frustrated and blame the user and bring in to question thier level of intelligence. Eventually I learned that it might not be the user...or anybody for that matter. There is a communication break down because of different realms of knowledge relating to both parties involved. For me to get the answers I needed, I had to find creative ways to rephrase the question. I asked numerous users the same questions 9 different ways from Sunday and very few actually figured out that I asked the same question over and over again, just in a way to shift the focus of the question to get the right detail I needed in an answer.
Search engines work much the same way. If you didn't get the results you wanted, rephrase the search terms or change the priority of the terms in the search string. The same principle can be applied to questioning the validity of a website. Unfortunatly, this way of dealing with a problem is not taught at school. It is also unfortunate that it would be difficult to do so without real world application. The fact that so few actually eventually pick it up later in life is a testament to the idea that there something fundamentally wrong with how we teach and develop problem solving skills at an earlier age than college. These kids should be entering higher education with the foundations of these skills already laid. If they were, there wouldn't be these cognitive problem solving issues.
They start to think that everything on they hear on TV is real or true, only this generation is one that was raised on the internet instead....
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
make something easy enough for monkeys to use and monkeys will end up using it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yes, that's really what they call the benchmark tests, though it stands for "Standards Of Learning". They are terrific at determining how much "trivia" (for lack of a better term) can be memorized by children, and regurgitated on a test. It's gotten so bad that SOL preparation takes up a substantial portion of the learning year. I have a colleague who moved here from NY around the middle of last year, and his kids nearly flunked several of their subjects. The reason was SOL based teaching - much of it is Virginia-history specific, apparently, and having spent 4-6 years in New York schools (which, apparently, are not part of the Great State of Virginia) did not know the minutiae taught here in order to pass the standard learning tests. This year they're doing great, having had the opportunity to memorize the appropriate facts from day one. This is not the kind of learning that will benefit these kids when they enter the real world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So, for Computer Science/IT/MIS majors, I'd recommend the following -
They are still students, after all...
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
It's the same writing and research skills they're missing, but ON A COMPUTER!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Everyone who listens to techno is an idiot.
Oh wait, you meant the OTHER techno
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
This just in, students not automatically good at doing the things they came to school to learn.
I don't see why this is suprising. Being admitted to college does not mean you know everything, it means you are capable of learning. Determining authority and crafting good written work are difficult skills to learn and it is not reasonable to expect hight school students to be experts. That's why universities teach it.
83% of all statistics are made up.
...I take offence to this.
My classmates might not. I doubt they read Slashdot.
Goten Xiao
Don't they realise that there's an objective way of precisely measuring the objectivity of a web site that every right-thinking (or did I mean left-thinking?) academic agrees with? Shame on them. It's not like objectivity is something you could dispute over.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Well DUH!!!
When you "persuade" someone, "irrelevant points" are useful if they can be used to emotionally "persuade" someone.
You see this all the time in political discussions.
The problems with "testing" people is that the people who write the tests have their own biases and opinions about what is "better" or "bad". And since they write the tests, their opinions are naturally considered to be more "correct" than the people they're testing.
I'm having the same problem right now! Computerized search either gives too many opinion articles, or too much duplication.
There are far more blogs on any topic than bona fide research. Try sifting through "global warming" to find any real research.
In my case, the Google search "RPM subpackages manual dependencies" returns the same "Maximum RPM" article (which I already read at rpm.org) mirrored on every continent! After 5+ pages of that, I get useless pages where other people are asking the same question!
In the old days, the Dewey Decimal System indexed titles or topics, e.g. Biology. They often hit more relevant terms than Google.
Yes, they are
This test uses simulated software which may be sufficiently different than what the person is used to that his test score suffers as a result. It's like giving a person a RPN calculator with instructions, then expecting him to be as proficient as he would be if he were using his own calculator.
Here's an example:
Many people may use a search engine that allows you to narrow a search by searching within previous results. This lessens and may eliminate the need to use "AND" altogether. The demo I saw required the student to use "AND" to get the correct score.
Let's assume this test's simulated software is similar to what your students will be using when doing real research.
IF your purpose is to find out if the students have proper training, and what additional training they need, then this is a evaluation useful tool.
IF you are using it to ask "why is Johnny a techo-idiot" or say "27% of college students are techno-idiots" when the real answer may be something as reasonable as "27% of college students just don't know your system yet, so teach him" then you aren't using the test correctly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I mean how many people buy the National Enquirer believing its a newspaper?
How many people watch Fox news thinking its just the same as CBS used to be?
Eric von Danikens chariot of the Gods was a best seller.
People believe George W Bush is just folks from Texas.
These results are pretty good compared with the results for old media.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
At least in my experience anyways. Most of the college students I know, run limewire and wonder why their computers run like crap. Gee, could it be the spyware and viruses? I think there should be a one week course on preventing this before anyone is allowed to use the internet.
I'll point us back to a couple of /. posts.
1 7/0342224
First, Nature found that people judge websites in a few milliseconds:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/
Then Harvard and Cal find that phishing works because people judge too much on the visual presentation:
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/30/1556226.shtml
Now we see that people are poor judges of content. Quite close to A + B = C.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Take a look at their flash demo. I think they pull this out of their asses pretty much. Not to say that any college students (myself included) do have critical thinking skills, but let's not get our knickers in a knot.
..of Warcraft. This is not anything surprising, and is not limited to those tubes on the internets. As people are constantly bombarded with spin or outright falsification, it becomes increasingly difficult to actually discern what is legitimate, objective information from what is not. Mass media constantly and actively subverts peoples' critical reasoning skills in order to convince them to buy an item or believe a statement based on limited or dubious claims. They purposely subvert and abuse data in order to create pseudo-scientific claims of validity. Corporations and political parties are especially guilty of this. But it extends much deeper when fundamental research is compromised in an effort to build data for a claim. Think tanks, R&D labs, and even research units at universities are often funded by organizations with an inherent conflicting interest in the objective conclusions of the research conducted. With so many competing and conflicting claims of validity, the decision to be an idiot is a rational statement on utility. When actually getting to the bottom of some claim, weighing evidence on multiple sides, and making judgements on their validity becomes excessively time-consuming or difficult, it is much easier and better to just go along for the ride. Everyone does this, to a certain degree. You have to find some source of information that is trusted, since it is impossible to independently verify every claim you see. But outside of incredibly boring peer-reviewed scientific journals that often bear little impact on peoples' daily lives, almost every other source of information from CNN to Fox News can have significant questions of trustworthiness, bias, or objectivity raised against it. It's almost miraculous when people can work out ingenious ways to actually wade through all of the crap with any degree of success at all, such as Google searches or Wikipedia. Make no mistake, civilization and progress are intimately connected to the ability for mankind to learn. Truth is under a relentless unresting attack by organized interests. - Reality has a well-known liberal bias. Stephen Colbert
Your comment got me thinking about something. I, too -- as well as most others here on Slashdot, I'd expect -- just "figured out" the internet, and most things about computers and technology in general.
However, I think that we had some motivation to. At least I did -- I was curious about the internet, and what information (insert porn joke here) I could find on it. So I figured out how to use it.
I suspect that a lot of people out there, have never really had any burning desire to use the internet to accomplish some task that wasn't trivial. Thus, they've never bothered to figure it out. I doubt they're completely incompetent, if they wanted to do it; they just don't care.
It reminds me of a (much) younger brother of mine, who was never much into computers. At about the same age that I started getting interested in technology, he found other hobbies. He knew where the power switch was on his iMac, but that was about it. When he wanted to look something up on the Internet, he'd usually just ask or call me, and I'd research it and send him back some results. When I started working and moved further away, it wasn't practical to do this anymore. The last time I went back and spent some time with him, he was significantly better at doing internet research. Not only that, but he had figured out how to install software, access technical forums and ask the right questions when it didn't work, and generally troubleshoot. He'd even bought and installed a new hard drive and RAM, and set up a WLAN and shared printer (by finding and following the right HOWTO-type articles). While it might seem trivial to the Slashdot crowd, this isn't bad for a casual computer user.
This was somebody who I had basically written off as so incompetent at anything electronic or mechanical, that he'd be a hazard to himself. (And in truth, later I found out that he had hosed his system more than once in the learning process.) But when there wasn't someone there to ask questions of, or do research for him, he had a reason to figure it out. And he did.
Sometimes you have to let people fail and learn on their own, if they're ever going to succeed at all.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I remember a random conversation in an FPS I used to play (counterstrike):
During a discussion about old computers:
Me: I still have my old 486 from 1994.
Random person: 486?! I'm still using a 333!!
People are techno idiots... not just college students. Although, that college students are just as bad as most people is kind of disheartening.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
This is not anything surprising, and is not limited to those tubes on the internets. As people are constantly bombarded with spin or outright falsification, it becomes increasingly difficult to actually discern what is legitimate, objective information from what is not.
Mass media constantly and actively subverts peoples' critical reasoning skills in order to convince them to buy an item or believe a statement based on limited or dubious claims. They purposely subvert and abuse data in order to create pseudo-scientific claims of validity. Corporations and political parties are especially guilty of this.
But it extends much deeper when fundamental research is compromised in an effort to build data for a claim. Think tanks, R&D labs, and even research units at universities are often funded by organizations with an inherent conflicting interest in the objective conclusions of the research conducted.
With so many competing and conflicting claims of validity, the decision to be an idiot is a rational statement on utility. When actually getting to the bottom of some claim, weighing evidence on multiple sides, and making judgements on their validity becomes excessively time-consuming or difficult, it is much easier and better to just go along for the ride.
Everyone does this, to a certain degree. You have to find some source of information that is trusted, since it is impossible to independently verify every claim you see. But outside of incredibly boring peer-reviewed scientific journals that often bear little impact on peoples' daily lives, almost every other source of information from CNN to Fox News can have significant questions of trustworthiness, bias, or objectivity raised against it.
It's almost miraculous when people can work out ingenious ways to actually wade through all of the crap with any degree of success at all, such as Google searches or Wikipedia. Make no mistake, civilization and progress are intimately connected to the ability for mankind to learn. Truth is under a relentless unresting attack by organized interests.
- Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Stephen Colbert
Of course they are...
... or and Ipod who that ... play music.
For the same price, if they have the choice between a Pocket PC that can read email, browse internet, read RSS feeds, run DOS apps, read PDFs, watch movies, listen music, do GPS navigation, Instant message, run Scumm games, run NES games, do calls with Skype, organize photos, create Word documents, create Excel documents, watch Powerpoint presentations, run VNC, plan budget, plan fitness, read an offline version of Wikipedia, compose music, etc...
They will pick the Ipod without hesitation, even if it doesn't have a replacable battery and they will even reveal their ignorance using clearly visible white earbuds!
Check.this.shit
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
As a college tutor who has tutored people for mathematics, CS, IT, and English, let me say that I think the results are overly conservative. I'd say the levels of illiteracy are much, much higher, if the sample I've encountered is any example. We're talking about 3rd year students who can't even write a descriptive paper on their daily activities; you know, a fucking journal entry.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I had this conversation recently:
Me: I'm going to remote into your computer. Can you go to logmein123.com?
Person: Log-you-in...
Me: No, log-me-in...
Person: Log-you-in...
Me: No, it's a website.
Person: Oh, you don't need the "www"?
Me: You can, www.logmein...
Person: logmein.com
Me: No, logmein123.com
Person: Oh, ok, logmein123.com
ETS has a vested interest in testing and grading. I would first question the accuracy and any ulterior motives of this study before blindly agreeing with their conclusions.
I'm sure they would love to create yet another testing industry around this particular study based on its "conclusions".
I just point directly behind me.
I support any organization that takes the sheep and leads them to a designated goal. So many people have given up their choice to have minds. They do not know how to be happy or how to access information.
PEOPLE! Listen up to articles like these. Even college students are mindless sheep to be directed for your own profit.Die when you die -GG Allin
At my college, every student is required to take a course called Fundamentals in Technology (F. iT for short) In it, all the subjects of this study are examined, students are taught what to look for in reputability and bias in a website as well as timeliness of the information. In addition, students are also taught more or less basic computer skills like a bit of powerpoint, website design with dreamweaver, and a bit of excel. Seeing the results I see that it is probably important that it is a required course. This study certainly doesn't show that student are not tech savvy, I'm certain that a large percentage are. They can live the digital lifestyle (iPod, Digital Camera, facebook, cell phone, etc. etc.) far better than the generations previous. It also doesn't show that they are idiots by any means. In fact, if you did this same study on college graduates from 20 years ago now you'd find the same result or worse. As some have pointed out, these critical thinking skills are the skills that are underdeveloped with many people without the added technology, so it shouldn't be such a shock that people are having the same trouble with the internet environment.
Sometime ago the whole dutch school system was overhauled and the Techincal schools (lower, middle and higher (with higher being just one level below university) were merged with the administrative schools.
This has been a mess wich has been critized by everyone except goverment who likes to experiment with an entire generation of childeren. Dropout rate is at an all time high, business is complaining that young people don't have any skills and teachers spend more time doing administration then teaching.
But recently I had my own experience with this. I visited a VMBO school. I have no idea what it would have been in the past (LTS or MTS) but the kids are between the ages of 12 and 16.
Like all school including the one I visited back when dinosaurs walked the earth the various projects by the kids are on display. For my class that was a fullscale aircraft frame based on a WW1 plane wich we had created in the first and second year. 3-4 it was full off-road vehicle.
What did I see on display at this "tech" school. Craftwork that you would expect to see in elementary school. Paper masks, crudly painted wooden figures.
I am not going to tell you what level their IT was at because it might kill you. Lets just say that frontpage is considered elite.
It wasn't just that the examples on display were simplistic crap. The classrooms themselves were childish. They are ordinary classrooms with a few pieces of machinery installed (too few and way too close together and nothing exciting) were as in my day you had real purpose build shops 3-4 times the size of a regular classroom with a wide range of heavy machinery of the same level you would expect in a commerical business.
This at least explains to me a lot about my experiences in the wild with young people fresh into the marketplace, I am not suprised now that a kid wires a electrical socket wrong when in shopclass he was still messing with batteries and clip on wires that I played with when I was six. maybe it is safer to not teach with main voltage but at least I never tried to see if a wire is live with my finger (actuall fact, not making this up. Guy put his finger against an exposed wire to test if there was current on it. There was and thank god for modern circuit breakers.)
Young kids ain't stupid. We usually beat them into shape within a year or two. The problem is the school system that tries to teach the same to everyone without being able to accept that some people just are stupid. So in order to raise the exam figures the level is being put and lower and lower so "no kid is left behind" but you end up with everyone being as stupid as the most stupid kid in class.
We used to have something nicknamed the "housewive academy" it was the school were you learned such skills as cooking an egg and doing laundry. Yes it was sexist but the simple fact is that it ain't much better if you now teach these skills to everyone at the expense of real skills.
College kids ain't stupid. They got the same spread of stupid and smart as the rest of society. The problem is we are teaching to the stupid, not the smart. But hey, no kid is left behind. Well except for the record number of dropouts and all those who leave school with no skills but well, you can't please everyone can you.
So you're saying the data you gathered is fairly worthless. Simply stunning.Do yourself a favor and look through these
There are many key combinations that save time and make you look snazzy.
Man, you really need that seminar!
For one thing, what is "the server"? What do you mean, were you loading a web page, and a message popped up? Were you trying to check your email? Help me out here. More often than not, I get a "well, the server is down isn't it?" response, to which, I cry. Heaven forbid they read the error message and let me know what it said, but people don't like to read.
Then we get the people who get the obvious error messages, but are either too stupid, or too convinced of their own stupidity to comprehend them, and years of doing this make me believe the latter are usually right. This from yesterday's support mail:
The woman was pissed because her message did not grow through, and she demanded that I fix it right away. Telling her that I couldn't change the maximum message size that Juno accepts was not as hard as you might think, and once she realized that the error message she had sent me, already said everything I told her..... I hope she felt like a dumbass for a moment. No, I do not think SMTP errors are too hard to understand, they are very english like, and very descriptive. Ever see the ones that say, "I have not succeeded in sending your letter for four hours, but I am still trying, this is not an error, just a warning, please don't send your message again."? Yeah, we get calls from people in a panic about these messages all the fracking time, "I got an error, oh my god, the world is coming to an end, save me Jebus!"
What it boils down to is this:
1) People have no idea how computers work, not even on a basic level.
2) People have some very poorly conceived/outright wrong notions about how computers work.
3) People see things in black and white; it is either working, or 'the server' is down.
4) People think that error messages are for geeks.
5) People think that geeks love fixing computers so much, that we should do it for free.
That last one is what really pisses me off. For starters, I have a life outside of fixing your inane little problems, secondly, I hate doing it. I love programming, networking, and my job in general, but cleaning granny's spyware encrusted pc for the billionth time.... it is beyond teh suck. And of course, anything that we love so much, and _should_ do for free has no value, therefore, it is not worth it to non techies to learn to care for their own pc.
This all spills over into the world of surfing for data online, everyone assumes www.trust-me-i-am-right-about-whatever.com = legit site, whereas members.tripod.com/~dr-phils/page/about/whatever.
Learning is not a high priority in our society, we stress memorization of facts. Which has its place, I can recite most major world events from the past couple centuries, but I am a history nut, comes with the territory. I would also love to engage some people in a conversation about why those events happened, and how they effect us today. Memorization doesn't help with that, and the computer world is no different. You can memorize the steps to sign in to AIM, or Myspace, but the minute the computer does something unexpected, you are up shit creek without some critical thinking skills. Which, I am sad to say, are in short supply these days.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The link says the test's reliability is .88. At least they give a definition: that's the correlation between results on multiple administrations of the test. So a critical reader will ask what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that has to do with anything normal people call "reliability".
Then you have to ask, if college students can't judge the objectivity and authority of a web site, how can the test administrators do it?
For that matter, I could have some recursive fun with the parent post. If realmolo will promise to take it as a joke and not an attack:
o How is "terrible" defined? Is it a relative or absolute measurement and how is it assessed?
o How many is "most"? "Most" out of what sample? How were their numbers counted or estimated?
o What's the chain of transmission between measurements of critical reading and the parent post? Did the parent refer to primary sources?
And that's what you can do to a statement that your own experience confirms (mine sure does).
Reading everything critically can leave you feeling like you were dropped on this planet by mistake and don't belong here.
"Ours is a high and lonely destiny".
ETS sells tests, such as the SAT and GRE.
Is it at all surprising that they would criticize people for being dumb, so that they can turn around and sell you a product that claims to allow you to weed out those dumb people?
Kyle: Well why don't you just tell people the truth?! (about conspiracy theories)
Bush: We do that too. And most people believe the truth. But one fourth of the population is retarded. If they wanna believe we control everything with intricate plans, why not let them?
trance idiots. oops, that'd include me! *runs and hides*
I taught technology at a middle school for a year, unfortunately... I remember spending a few days trying to teach them how to really use a search engine. The general idea was that you should:
We also went over how search engines work, and I taught them to think of words that would appear on a page that held the answer they were looking for. For instance, if the question is, "How much does the moon weigh?" then you might search for the word "tons" -- even though it's not in the actual question, it would certainly be in the answer.
I thought they had it, so I made up a list of questions and let them loose on Google. And what did they do, after all that? They typed the entire question, verbatim, into the search engine box.
Most of them were also unable to distinguish ads from actual content; they would click on them indiscriminately. The fake error box ads got them every time. And it wasn't for lack of experience; some of them spent just as much time on the Internet as I did, but still they had no mental filters.
On the other hand, they were extremely good at finding all kinds of inappropriate content. We used to have races - they would look at as many dirty-joke-skateboarding-crash-video-rap-artist-bi o-flash-game-and-other-Internet-crapware sites as they could, and I would monitor the router logs and block sites as fast as I could manage. It kept me pretty busy, but by the end of the year I had a great blacklist.
I would expect this kind of competency from middle schoolers, but by college you should know better. If you can write an English paper, you should be able to think critically enough about a topic to Google it effectively.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
If you look at what they tested, it has very little to do with technology. The fact that they were being asked to perform these tasks with a computer does not change that.
First, they were asked to select a thesis statement (essentially). Surprise, few of them could -- which is what I'd expect from our education system.
They couldn't identify which websites were relevent or authoritative to their topic. Well, I bet they couldn't do that with books, or when speaking to someone who claims to be an expert, or watching TV, or any number of other means of information gathering. People are stupid and believe anything they're told and never bother to examine the source or information critically. Shocking.
They proved to be inept at making slides for presentations. The criteria was how well and efficiently they put information into a slide, how relevent that information was, and so forth. I am not the least bit surprised to discover that people write stupid shit, don't understand what they're talking about, and are almost completely incapable of expressing a simple idea to another human.
But none of this is really related to technology. It's just people being stupid, brainless, slavering mouth-breathers. Welcome to Earth.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
The words you're looking for is instant gratification. We've been trained on NOW! Get it NOW! Understand it NOW! Combine that with the "multitasking", and you have the present situation.
The college students portrayed a lot more smarts when dealing with their peers. They respect women more, and women feel safer in society. The gap between race, ie. black white and latino, as well as pacific natives such as fijian has been narrowed. People feel good again for once in their lives and authoritative websites is the least of their concern.
I gave an informative speech on search engines to my speech class a year or so ago. I explained what engines existed, how they work, and how to use them effectively. And the response? "Wow, I never knew there was such a thing as advanced search". and "You are like way smart".
While I may have failed to get through to anyone in 8 minutes, I discovered there needs to be a class called Internet Research Methods. The curriculum should cover: (1) evaluating web sites for bias and authority (not just appearance) (2) boolean logic (3) the page rank algorithm (4) formulating a refined search string
Much of the current non-CS teachers are to blame. They don't understand the internet, so they gruffly say "internet sources are not allowed on the paper, hurumpt, go to the library." When the all the library has now is crumbling, ancient texts and 200 internet terminals with MSIE. What do you expect to happen? Researching in a library requires work. Computer networks took a lot of that physical work away. People got lazy, but researching still requires all that hard work to be effective, even when using a computer.
Essentially, good research takes A LOT of time and A LOT of sources and critical eye, since quality information is hard to find. There is a lot of crap out there, if you are too lazy to sift through it, you aren't going to find anything. -- That is the problem.
I'm posting from in class. I might be an idiot for doing it, but I'd think that I'm not a techno-idiot.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
...have anything to do with tech savvy?
Further, when was the last time a set of teachers and students could agree on what constituted a good research statement?
This "research" appears to have gone looking to prove "students are tech idiots" and found exactly what it was looking for. Woohoo, nice job guys. Perhaps we should conduct a similar study on whether or not most researchers are idiots by grading them on how well they can solve real world problems... (Since these researchers apparently felt it was appropriate to judge the tech idiocy of students based on their research skills.)
Wow, revelation of the century, students are bad at research and communication. That's because those are hard things to teach and they're quite often glossed over. Even some "researchers" are bad at this stuff! Heck being crappy at it sometimes even earns you more money than being good at it. (Kind of like writing software...)
"Contrast that to a study which shows something you don't want to believe, the first thing that happens, you question the methodology."
Hey! How about those "piracy hurts the industry" studies?
"Techno" idiots? If someone thinks whitehouse.com is the official White House website, he or she is probably not so great at evaluating printed text either.
At least fifty percent of people are idiots.
/. using firefox, that counts for something around here), there are a LOT of people who are worse off than myself.
I'm in college, and while I don't think of myself as incredibly savvy (though I am reading
In first year, a friend decided the big metal side of her Dell computer case was a great place to put her magnetized white board. It stopped working in a little under a day.
The problem is that most people never learn concepts, they learn how to do one specific task. For example, someone showed them that you can find the MTV website by typing MTV into Google, but they don't know why, or how it works. So when they need something a little more complex, and type in a paragraph of questions, they don't understand why it works.
You can't expect people who only used the internet for recreation to be able to suddenly transfer it to a more strict academic context.
In fact, I bet that not even close to 10% have even heard of Kraftwerk.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
Teachers have ever lowering expectations and students stoop to meet them. And let's face facts we are experiencing the Wikipediazation of Knowledge aka Truthiness. Things are whatever you claim them to be. Facts and accuracy don't matter and no one cares.
to users the UI is the system.
or more broadly, what they can see is the system.
For her intentions, the most probabaly correct answer is yes.
Technically correct? no. Is it correct for practical purposes? yes.
At least she grasped it was something outside her computer.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IT is easy enough for anyone to do with no schooling....
Expect to be replaced by people with nio education and the will to work for min. wage.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I for one welcome our job security providing overlords.
Information was gathered from 6300+ test takers at 63 four-year colleges and universities, community colleges and high schols, who took the ICT Literacy Assessment in 2006. Institutions selected the students that would take the assessment. Some chose to test students enrolled in a particular course, some used a random sampling process, and still others issued an open invitation and ofered gift certificates as incentives. Because the data is not a random sample and is not representative of all US institutions or all higher education instutions, ETS urges caution in using these results to generalize to the greater population of college-age students.
But hey, what the hell, let's do it anyway! I just know that Dr. Dronebot's 8 AM Technology for Freshman Athletes section was happy to participate in the study and filled out all the answers to the absolute best of their ability.
We allow these people to vote! They get to decide that George W Bush would be a fabulous leader. That invading Iraq is a great way to catch binladen.
Deleted
I don't think the majority of college kids know a thing about DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin, or Moby.
The faculties at teaching colleges are basically complaining that students are getting politically incorrect information. "If they only knew how to throw out websites that disagreed with the Progressivist Agenda, why then they'd be educated"
I've see the materials by which they try to indoctrinate future teachers on this very subject, and it is all about viewpoint bias.
I work with them everyday. They're not as tech savvy as I would have thought if I didn't get the chance to work with them. Even the CS majors aren't doing to well.... I hear all the stereotypes about Linux and OSX, education is not doing it's job...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206942&op=Repl y
A College Junior at that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find that they're favoring Emo and Rap these days. Techno is so twentieth century.
At the risk of having my excellent karma downmodded into oblivion, I present a clip from The Boondocks. It is rather crude and uses a profane word that is usually used in a racist manner, so don't say you weren't warned.
But basically, I think he's right. Most "technology" kids use today are just high-tech toys. Being good at using Google actually requires having a decent vocabulary and broad knowledge base (a traditional, non-tech type of education), or at least the drive to dig deeper and read a little more to find more terms to key on. For the most part, we're just lazy and aren't willing to put in the necessary work to find the kind of information that is useful.
... the real reasons why people can't judge the quality of information they are given. Lets face it, we are 'zerging' ourselves to death with information. (Definition: a term from starcraft in which overwhelming numbers of troops are sent at the enemy) 1) People simply do not have the time and brain processing power necessary, even before the internet, the volume of information and propaganda produced simply overwhelms peoples intellectual ability to cope with it. It's enormously tedious and time consuming and would take one many lifetimes if one was to "verify everything" we take a lot of information simply as a "given", because the benefits outway the costs. 2) Citical thinking skills do not apply equally to everybody, due to varying factors in information processing ability of the mind, ever notice that there are people that are expert at detecting when someone is lying about something, while at the same time believing the dumbest shit imaginable? 3) The advent of specialization has now made it exceedingly difficult to impossible for non-specialists to make good decisions about area's of which they are completely ignorant. This is part of the reason that voters in democracy's are increasingly impotent as population sizes and specialization increase.
I can't believe you are talking about failure! You can't let them fail! Doing so might hurt their delicate emotions and could damage them for life! "What about the children?!" "Everyone is a winner..." ...yadda, yadda, yadda...
-Beau
> 5) People think that geeks love fixing computers so much, that we should do it for free.
This one comes up so often with me too. I hate it, though I make a nice living out of fixing computers on the side, I'm fed up of helping so-called friends (not my close friends and family), I'm very tempted to say I've given up using them completely and say I'm unable to help. Seems to be the only way out of it.
Combine this with the fact that my job as coding is paid about as much as a delivery person, I'm tempted to get a job doing that instead. Hell, at least its more varied and I might actually get rid of the back-ache I've had for 3 years now.
I'm not moaning, but I'd like to know what other people think about this. I'm so tempted to throw everything I've learnt in computing away - I'm by no means a complete expert at everything but I do PHP coding for a living, and to a pretty complex standard. I'd feel like I was letting myself and others down by not doing it anymore but the stress and anger is too much. I feel like I'm losing!
Probably my blog would've been a better place for this, but I might get some replies on this, even though its completely off-topic.
Monkeyboi
why don't you do the same test on a different type of people like say... garbage men, housewifes, toilet cleaners
if they do better, then this study is shocking - otherwise it's crap...
also what semester were the students in? in the first two semesters you've got many idiots (the ones throwing paper airplanes and copying others solutions to the assignments)... from the third semester on they are mostly gone...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I'm 13, and most kids I have spoken to think that Microsoft Windows is the only operating system that exists. Its sad really, how they think that they are computer experts. Replying to what someone said before, I agree that kids don't know much about the computer and the Internet. If they knew about effective Web design, they wouldn't use Myspace anymore.
I think the problem lies with the schools. In my school, students don't learn about the computer, they just learn about how to use programs. The students don't learn about how a computer works, or the computer's parts. If you ask them basic computer/Internet questions (and I have), they won't know the answers. Many of them don't even know how to protect their PCs from computer virii, malware, worms, and the likes, let alone know about the parts of a computer.
I had to take this test when it came around. Apart from being a complete waste of my time, the test itself was poorly conducted. I am very computer literate which actually worked against me. Any time I tried to use a "short-cut" it was counted as incorrect. Many of the questions were terribly vague or matters of opinion. For example, if you wanted to start a slide-presentation with a question or product demonstration to grab attention, you would be counted wrong because you are always supposed to start the presentation with a clear title according to the test makers.
(Whatever happened to Sharkbait?)
I didn't RTFA, but from the summary, it sounds like a lack of communication, research, and critical thinking skills, not "techno" skills. Not every dang thing is a "techno" skill just because you're using a computer to do it.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
A kid down the hall asked me if i could help him find a key for Microsoft flight simulator.
All he was doing was typing in "key generator" into google and clicking on the first link.
WEP keys don't work on video games, lol.
"Infecting minds with my own memetic virus, one post at a time." Ultimape
As someone who teaches research to grad students all I can say is, "Agreed". They believe they're gods of searching (doesn't everyone?) and really aren't.
Dean
Okay, no more "mod parent up" posts. I'd rather use my new hunting knife on a small animal, but an idiotic person will do.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Irony: The fact that your bullshit detector is as broken as the collage idiots in TFA.
I won't bother arguing with you about a crackpot such as Lomborg, plenty of others have done a better job than I could.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I agree, it's a false dichotomy. The "algorithm" for critical thinking is useless when there is no "data" to think about.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
... most of them YES!
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Would an English major really posses the skills to operate a cash register? I think not.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
There all a bunch of vidiots! Bob Kiger www.videographyblog.com
WE are all a bunch of vidiots?
I'd be curious to see what the results would be if rather than given a standard question, people were tested on areas of their expertise. I've been 20+ years in bioscience, so given a biomedical query I know exactly where to start looking, the keywords to use, the structure of the subject headers, how to move sideways into related terms, and how to evaluate what I have retrieved based on who wrote it and where I found it. In a matter of minutes I'll have exactly what I need. Now take history, not my field. It took me days (cumulative) searching to find the books and articles I needed for some hobby research I was doing. I haven't a clue how to move through the Library of Congress classification system. I have no idea how to evaluate what I find, except by cross-reading and seeing where the consesus lies. One task, I'm highly competent. Another, I'm a techno-illiterate. Can the process of searching a knowledge domain be considered independent of innate knowledge of the domain?
Two Fools
One says, "This is old, and therefore good."
And one says "This is new, and therefore better."
1) create a test for [insert subject-du-jour here] 2) give said test to group of willing participants (it helps to throw in some free grub for their efforts) 3) publish results of test to validate the test AND the results as well as to show the test's usefulness and to demonstrate that there is a "growing crisis" that the test addresses. 4) By the way... you can order yours (not free) so that you too can see just how moronic your students are. Here's how: Ordering Tests The ICT Literacy Assessment is an Internet-delivered test. To order the ICT Literacy Assessment, download the order form (PDF) and fax it to 1-609-771-7835 or 1-609-771-7255. Or contact an ICT Literacy Assessment Specialist by calling toll free 1-800-745-0269 or sending an e-mail to highered@ets.org. and for the low price of $29.99, we'll add this nice shiny new set of Ginsu knives. FREE! What a gimmic!