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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 :-)
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
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
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.
Most people are great at critical reading, like me.
Firewire
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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 -
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'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.
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."