Slashdot Mirror
College Freshmen Struggle With Tech Literacy
snow_man writes to mention an article on the E-Commerce News site about techno-literacy problems with incoming college freshmen. Some schools, like CSU, are planning on including a technology comprehension test alongside their English and Math evaluations for new students. From the article: "Not all of Generation M can synthesize the loads of information they're accessing, educators say. 'They're geeky, but they don't know what to do with their geekdom,' said Barbara O'Connor, a Sacramento State communications studies professor involved in a nationwide effort to hone students' computer-research skills. On a recent nationwide test to measure their technological 'literacy' -- their ability to use the Internet to complete class assignments -- only 49 percent of the test-takers correctly evaluated a set of Web sites for objectivity, authority and timeliness. Only 35 percent could correctly narrow an overly broad Internet search."
These people who can't do searches, they click on results where the summary clearly shows that it is not the desired material.
I heard it was worst at one company I worked for. People would go to Google, type in a website url to search for, and click the link. The idea of putting the url into the url box of the web browser doesn't register for some users. It's the Google generation.
- Dan Rather's debacle with the Word documents
- 920 Reuters images being pulled because they're suspected of being altered
- the Jayson Blair situation over the course of many years
The point is, adults in this nation think these traditional institutions are objective, so why are we faulting the youth for their assumptions?People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them...
Sweden and Russia and two good examples of how a government can achieve excellent results by actively developing and implementing common standards in education. Parents, who themselves grew up in the TV-watching culture, are unlikely to encourage their children to read. Only the government, through a well-planned national campaign, can break this cycle. The way to a better public education system is not throwing more money at the problem. I agree with you here. I think the answer is in further standardization of curricula, textbooks, teaching and testing methods, introduction of uniforms in public schools, and a better system for evaluating professional competency of the faculty. Higher salaries for teachers is where the extra money should go.
I think that the pace of a class shoud be dictated by the top third (or so) of the class. If only because I would rather challenge the bright students than allow them to become bored enough that they stop caring. Based on personal experience, I believe that holding good students back is a good way to kill the morale of students and teachers.
/.; maybe we should have a discussion/story on what has worked for us?
I would rather see a fraction of the students (~1/4) meeting lofty educational objectives than 3/4 of the class meeting mediocre objectives. But then I was in school back when classes were classified as "A" and "B." (The "A" reading/english class, and the "A" math class.) With the right (or wrong) marks, you could be moved into the faster (or slower) paced classes.
Interestingly, the difference between the slow class and the fast class was often the level of emphasis on independent critical thinking... So the "A group" students who could already think critically, learned how to do so more efficiently and more effectively. The "B group" students who were a little behind in their critical thinking abilities, or who did not have any, were brought up to speed. Same basic course topics, but two different types of classes, for two different styles of thinking. And yes, it works.
I'm sure that there would be lawsuits and lots of parents bitching about how little Billy's ego has been crushed. Well, I was in the slow reading/english and slow math classes after I transferred to a different school, and I don't remember giving a crap. (Though I do remember moving to the faster classes the next semester.) And the few people that I knew who were idiots enough to "make fun of" the slow students *were* the slow students. I'll also say that the "B" classes were fine; they covered the essential material, and they were often taught by the same teachers as the "A" classes. (They alternated by semester.)
It would be interesting to see how today's kids (and their parents) would handle the grade schools and high schools of the 80's and 90's. My guess is that the results couldn't possibly be any worse than what we are seeing now.....
There are some bright people on
Those links (at least the first couple of pages) don't contain instructions on how to get out of a paper bag. They are just sites that refer to paper bags, or use the phrase "couldn't $$$$$ his/her way out of a paper bag." So, what is the magic Google-fu required to Google one's way out of a paper bag?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Just because they use "tech" devices does not mean they understand how they actually work. A calculator is an example. Many are taught how to use one, but have no concept of the math involved.
Indeed. Here in Norway, there's an ongoing debate about the rather appalling math level of our school kids. I'm certain it has a LOT to do with calculators. All they learn now is how to punch numbers into a calculator and get some result.
I saw this first hand when I tried to help my girlfriend take some slightly more advanced math. If she encountered an assignment where she was unsure of how to proceed, she would grab the calculator and examine each and every button on it, trying to find that "magic button". In most cases the assignment could be solved perfectly without a calculator.
I like my previous math professor's attitude. When solving some problem on the blackboard, he could say "and then you can punch this into a calculator and get some number, but that's not the important part".
Hmm I agree with your professor - but, and that is a big but - for people other than math majors, the number is the most important thing.
I knew thought I should write this, but people need to be better to do math in their heads. An example would be the 6 question of this test from moronland that fooled me earlier this day http://moronland.net/moronia/moron/1077/
Freedom or George Bush
Unless you know the exact url, that's usually the quickest way to find a site. A notorious example: try to get the Nissan car company website in the USA.
Yes, I am. Inside my own field I have better options than Google, i.e. I have my own library, notes, etc. But for subjects with which I am less familiar, my favorite method is to look it up in Google, followed by the Wikipedia, although this order could be reversed. It's mostly the convenience in my browser (konqueror) where I can type "gg:" followed by the search string to go directly to Google that sets my preference.
The Propaedia, or outline of the EB, the Syntopicon, the index of ideas and themes which framed the Great Books of the Western World.
The Propaedia is the most useless book in my EB, I have never used it for anything. It could be useful, perhaps, if one wanted to start a methodical study of some subject, but that's what textbooks are for. Let's open the Propaedia at random, here we are: page 535, Division II, section 825-D The religions of Korea. I get ten pointers to articles, the first of which is 10:530-534, which is, naturally, "Korean Religion" in the Macropaedia. If I'm going to read that article, I'll certainly find other pointers to look over, I don't need the Propaedia for that.
I would generally classify an encyclopedia as a middle step between the web and a textbook. For a quick idea on a subject, I search the web, for a better understanding I read the Britannica, for in-depth knowledge I get a book. For me, the web is a much improved substitute to library catalog search.
In the UK, they rejigged the NHS a bit, introducing an "internal market", where hospitals would be in competition with one another and would bid against each other for things.
From Wikipedia:
In 1990, the National Health Service & Community Care Act (in England) defined this "internal market", whereby Health Authorities ceased to run hospitals but "purchased" care from their own or other authorities' hospitals. Certain GPs became "fund holders" and were able to purchase care for their patients. The "providers" became independent trusts, which encouraged competition but also increased local differences.
What happened was that nobody provided the best healthcare, they provided the cheapest healthcare possible, fund holders bought that healthcare (where corners had obviously been cut) and the hospitals got less funding because they could "provide" "healthcare" so cheaply.
If you want another example of private ownership completely fucking up a formerly public service in the name of profit, then I invite you to read up on British Rail and its dismantling, and its replacement with a system of about 348420 "competing" train companies sharing the same track and none of the maintenance duties, where train companies run services in the cheapest possible way (usually meaning hell for passengers) and collect government subsidies for fucking up the service even further.
Did "competition" help the NHS or British Rail? No, it fucked them up, subjecting them to undue internal and external pressures. My point is this: FREE MARKETS AND COMPETITION ARE NOT A PANACEA. If you are providing a public service then trying to fit that public service into a free market model, or trying to make it make a profit, simply will not work without some drastic corner cutting.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
If my CD or DVD looks like it's on it's last legs, I can put it in to my computer, make an ISO and burn a fresh one.
If my book looks like it's on it's last legs, I need to OCR it, manually read through the OCR copy to check for mistakes and formatting issues, reformat the data, and then hit print.
Computers are a technology. They have their advantages and they have their disadvantages (storing large volumes of formatted text is something computers do very well - financial pressures aside, I'd rather have my greatest creations traded over BitTorrent, posted on blogs and stored in the Internet Archive than I would have them stored in libraries - instant, redundant, off-site backups are a *lot* cheaper than professional librarians).
Technology has made more social opportunities possible - think meetup.com, think SMS and e-mail as a method for rapid group organisation. It may feel nicer to send out formal invitation on beautiful stationery. A few months ago, a friend of mine put together a Geek Dinner event attended by around 100 people in the space of about three days. Without computers and the Internet, that sort of social organisation would not have been possible.
For a certain sub-set of the "Google generation" (or whatever you want to call them), the Internet has actually been a return to literacy and written communication. Sure, most blogs ain't Shakespeare (and I have no illusions that mine is Shakespeare), but if you compare the twenty year old today with their social equivalent twenty years ago, today's young'un is doing a hell of a lot more written communication. I can tell you from personal experience that what taught me how to write properly wasn't my school's English department, it was a desire to write TV reviews for a friend's online magazine. That is what prompted me to buy a writing manual and sharpen up my skills. That wouldn't have happened twenty years ago - I would have been smoking weed and watching MTV. Now, my generation is smoking weed (or using some fancy 'designer drug'), watching MTV videos on YouTube and engaging in philosophical debate online. There is a key difference there, and it's thanks to technology.
As for books, well I'll let Cory Doctorow have the last word:
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
I just checked with several variations. The most successful was
"find his way out of a paper bag" instructions
Basically there's lots of info about paper bags and what goes into them and crafty little things you can do with them.
But there is no way to google yourself out of a paper bag. Can't be done.
I attended a Catholic primary school (this is not an add for Catholicism, as I stand against all primitive artificial power constructs) with over 100 kids in first grade, yet we all learned to read, in English as well as beginning instruction in German, French and Spanish [and there were many immigrants and poor kids in that class - I was one of those poor kids]. And, as you made mention of in a follow-up post, the older children were send to the younger grades to act as tutors and aid and abet the educational process.
In other words, maybe it does take a "community" to educate a child.....(and yes, there exists a definite conspiratorial flavor to the dumbing down of America - anyone who doesn't realize that the reading list I had in third grade is now the reading lists at sophmore and junior years in college aren't particularly astute - and soooo many of these conspiracies turn out to be reality to those of us who read history).