Are College Students Techno Idiots? 297
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.
It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter, most people don't really like to read at all.
It's not tech that they are missing... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nothing new. Decades of teaching to standardized tests and ignoring the thought process in favor of fact regurgitation has led to this.
according to who? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I write distance learning software (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Not "Techno" idiots (Score:1, Insightful)
This is not suprising in the least (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not tech that they are missing... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was fortunate to have parents and college professors that demanded I develop critical thinking skills -- there is no way I would have developed them otherwise. This is from someone who went to a school district regarded as one of the best in NJ (at the time).
Re:It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
Revenge of the Liberal Arts Majors (Score:5, Insightful)
So, for Computer Science/IT/MIS majors, I'd recommend the following -
Re:It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Digital generation (Score:2, Insightful)
At this point I'm sure it's just going to be a matter of time before popular opinion catches up with the reality. I'm sure people were the same when cars first appeared and old fogies didn't know how to work them. I doubt anyone in the 70's assumed a kid was a wizard mechanic just because he'd been around cars all his life.
Certainly the end of the world.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can lead a horse to water... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is certainly the end of the world... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:It's not tech that they are missing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Where do you stop? (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Re:Clearly this is posted by ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen a couple of lists on how to judge a site. The one [cornell.edu] from Cornell has points like:
- Is the author different than the webmaster?
- What URL/domain is used?
- Is it an information page or an advertisesment?
- Modified date/is it current?
- Are the links correct and match the page?
Sure, these are nice - but they hardly apply everywhere. There are a lot of things in the sciences that haven't changed, so a date of 1998 hardly impacts the validity of the page. There are also a lot of old pages with broken links. Still doesn't impact their information. This happens quite a bit when you find a white paper and an organization decided to redesign their entire site. You can still find the paper through Google, but the old URL is useless.Same problem with requiring contact information for the author. A lot of government agencies only list the webmaster as a contact in the page footer. Does that mean the page is invalid? No. It means that government sources don't have specific authors. A USDA report is still a USDA report even if it is 5 years old, doesn't list an author and has broken links. How do we teach when the rules don't matter?
I think the problem is people are trying to come up with rules to apply, and there are a lot of exceptions. Remember Dihydrogen Monoxide? [dhmo.org] it was a complete joke - but the site "passed" the criteria. So it must be a valid source. Right? If people were trained to think on their own, instead of being taught how to apply rules, I think we would be better off.
remember (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Clearly this is posted by ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to bring it up cuz it will start the same old argument again, but since a lot of people can't decide whether or not wikipedia is a valid source, how can we trust most of them to know what's acceptable?
A\long with that, there are a lot of schools that teach certain guidelines as absolute. I was taught that that any web page with a "~" towards the end was bad, regardless of whether or not the webpage was
Point is, I don't trust this study until I know what their criteria is or what their questions were. As for the questions, it's just like statistical surveys that ask "Do you drink A) never B) one or two drinks a night C) more than 2 drinks in a night" and conclude that 50% of people are binge drinking alcoholics because they answered C, even though that doesn't take into account how often they drink more than 2 drinks in a night, or a variety of other problems.
Lack of knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)
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.