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.
Clearly this is posted by ... (Score:3, Funny)
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I wonder if they all had to sit through those Library "orientation" classes
Personally, I have serious doubts about anyone's ability to teach a "techno idiot" the ability to judge the authoritativeness or objectivity of web sites, etc during a single class period.
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:
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.
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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 cert
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ID10T5 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:ID10T5 (Score:5, Funny)
My personal longstanding theory is that the total global I.Q. is a constant. It's just split up among an exponentially growing population.
Every seven seconds or so I feel a brain cell trying to die.
Re:ID10T5 (Score:5, Funny)
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"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"
Since I read this on Slashdot, it must be true. I did a search for 'computer users are idiots', and came up with this website we're talking on.
But I do know how to tailor a message to a particular audience, because I used a beowulf cluster of idiotic students to type this out for me. Ima
It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter, most people don't really like to read at all.
Re:It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people I know here (Suburban NY) refuse to read any work aside from 'executive' summaries & Cliff notes. I write techincal papers for a living; I would say a good 90% read the first page (the afore mentioned 'executive' summary) and proceed to fire off questions about what is covered in the other 99% of the document. We intentionally write in 'lay man''s' terms to avoid talking over many people, yet they refuse to read anything more than the first 1 - 2 pages. We have purposfully tested this idea with writing the first five pages in english, then filing in the rest with either technobable from a Markov Generator or pages from lipsum. Although this was an unimportant document, only one person actually asked what the rest of the document ment. Ouch. It's a good thing that I don't have to stay if layed off by a decent program (since that could easily generate a two page summary for these idiots).
Re:It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Funny)
This comment is too long. Can someone give me an executive summary?
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I agree (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's not college students, it's people (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Mod parent up! (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, the report gives points to people who point out that an EDU or GOV site is inherently less biased than a
Actually, it's fairly well known that academics have a left-wing bias. I spent a very interesting year working in an academic environment, and can confirm this to be true through direct observation. Government, of course, has a bias in favour of the programs it's referencing. If I wanted to find an impartial take on the Social InSecurity programme, for example, I don't think SSA.GOV would be the right place to start.
Finally, their mostly content-free slide presentation does not inspire confidence, at least in me. And the Flash "Demo" doesn't allow me to try it out; it just demonstrates it in action. Boring, and the use of audio makes it over-long and far more tedious than it would have otherwise been. Thes are not the information management and presentation skills I expect from a world-class organization - especially since far less complex and easier to develop systems would have worked better.
D
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Those were the first questions that popped into my mind: what exactly did these questions look like, who exactly were they testing, who exactly was doing the test taking, etc.
Yours is one of the first commments on the story that I've read so I'm not sure yet whether these questions have been asked -- I'll have to scroll down
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Actually, it's just that our critical reading skills made it instantly clear to most of us that such effort was totally unecessary, and therefore we didn't waste our time on it.
The most important part of critical thinking is knowing when to actually bother with it.
(Protip: Slashdot? Not so much.)
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And as with all of these "OMG everyone else is so teh stupid!!!" stories, it's not as if people here are especially inclined to critical thinking either when the day's swallowed-whole press release is congenial to their own snobberies.
For example, don't you think a statement like "52 percent correctly assessed the objectivity of the sites, 65 percent correctly judged for authority" is meaningless without a bit of added context? (If you've actual
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*Most* people are terrible at critical reading. Just terrible. For that matter, most people don't really like to read at all.
I find this entire thread greatly entertaining. I think most people are very poor at critical thinking, including critical reading skills because it is not taught in most public schools. Logic, reasoning, critical thinking, and the rhetorical method should be foundations for much of eduction, but they aren't and I have a number of hypothesis as to why. First, students equipped with
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 re
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It's not that people don't like to read, it's just they don't like to read TFA.
So... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
We were all so much smarter at their age, because that's how we care to remember things.
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It's not uncommon when I drive home from work to have stupid 14 yr olds jump in the middle of the road, or walk like 9 across down a road...
Kids are stupider today than yesterday because we fear forcing them to learn shit all. Can't discipline them, can't fail them, etc, etc, etc...
Not that kids my age weren't stupid when we were teens, just that teens today are STUPIDERERER.
Tom
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Re:So... (Score:4, Funny)
It seems to me that it's about purple haddocks that live in houses made of straw. I could be wrong though ...
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.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
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I was fortunate to have parents and college professors that demanded I develop critical thinking skill
Virginia SOL (Score:5, Interesting)
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Management, you say? Well, that settles it - we all know that there's are no critical thinking in management.
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Re:It's not tech that they are missing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful, though, because there are school systems who have dismissed "regurgitation" like memorizing multiplication tables in favor of teaching "process". This results in people who can give you a general outline of problem-solving processes but can't solve problems. They neither have practice in solving problems, nor can they multiply 6x30 without a calculator.
So for young kids, I don't think it's either teaching them "facts" nor is it teaching them "process", but instead in might be something like "forcing them to practice". Given enough practice, kids will learn to memorize important information, throw away useless trivia and info they can look up, and discover their own best processes.
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Let's see....
30+30+30+30+30+30 =
60+30+30+30+30 =
90+30+30+30 =
120+30+30 =
150+30 =
180!
It works... Just not as efficiently.
BTW (It's a joke.)
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Wow (Score:2)
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 ...
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
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
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Which was better?
Re:Yes (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, as Djikstra said,
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.
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Funny)
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I completely agree -- and I'm a college student myself! The stupidity in general, and technological stupidity in particular, is astounding even here at a seemingly "good" school.
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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
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Some of them make it. Don't get me wrong. But most, including some of the 'successes', are miserable about it.
I'm am not a cr
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You might as well do it for your computer labs as well. I
key combinations (Score:2)
There are many key combinations that save time and make you look snazzy.
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Many of the teachers (generally in English or Social Studies), on the other hand, have trouble with even the most basic functions. Worse, they often blame their students (or the softw
Not a surprise unfortunately... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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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?
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There are a number of things I could write about and slap them up on the internet for people to read, and while they would be quite factual and well written, someone not familiar with the subject would have a hard time telling if that were the case. After all, there's no reason to trust me -- most people haven't a clue who I am. And even if I were to add references, I could either make them to general works, or to obscure
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There are a number of things I could write about and slap them up on the internet for people to read, and while they would be quite factual and well written, someone not familiar with the subject would have a hard time telling if that were the case. After all, there's no reason to trust me -- most people haven't a clue who I am. And even if I were to add references, I could either make them to general works, or to obscure works that most people wouldn't bother to track down for verification. The problem is
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It does, but with printed material there tends to be that chain of trust in existence. Most people are willing to put some trust in Addison-Wesley or O'Reilly publishing to not put out junk (unfortunately this isn't the case everywhere -- see Apress' recent Practical OCaml for an example... whoof!). And a lot of the journals and conference proceedings have a higher sense of trust as they tend to be peer-reviewed and ev
Programming students might be the worse... (Score:2)
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my point is that if kids can't program, they should be given f's so they can either learn they're not cut out for programming or they can start working harder. computer science is a lot more than just clicking around on a computer...
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Computer Science is also a lot more than just programming. There are plenty of theory guys who aren't all that sharp when it comes to actual programming but very much belong in Computer Science. I'm not saying they shouldn't be given F's in programming-specific classes if they deserve it, but there are plenty of CS degree paths that don't do much more than entry level programming and that is a good thing.
Digital generation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Kids these days have keystroke habits? I don't think I've seen anyone other than the handful of compsci geeks at my school who knows how to use keyboard shortcuts. It's immensely painful watching someone switch between the mouse and the keyboard every second, especially when they're entering data into a long web form or something like that.
A Switch (Score:2)
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.
Breakdown by Major (Score:2)
Sample Questions? (Score:2)
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.
This is not suprising in the least (Score:2, Insightful)
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Obviously, the solution is to make all gradeschool students work at helpdesks!
Its like kids who were raised by their TV... (Score:2)
It just goes to show you (Score:2)
Revenge of the Liberal Arts Majors (Score:5, Insightful)
So, for Computer Science/IT/MIS majors, I'd recommend the following -
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They also use their college skills to communicate clearly when they ask me, "Do you want fries with that?".
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To make the facile assumption that everyone needs to be able to do both is to miss the point of hiring specialists in the first place.
Frankly, in my experience, technical people and communication people both believe that thei
This isnt tech (Score:2)
In my opinion (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait, you meant the OTHER techno
What terribly ignorant students! (Score:2)
Why should life be different online? (Score:2)
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.
We're too visual (Score:4, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org]
Now we see that people are poor judges of content. Quite close to A + B = C.
Highly Ironic? (Score:2)
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.
Certainly the end of the world.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Real conversation (Score:2)
During a discussion about old computers:
Me: I still have my old 486 from 1994.
Random person: 486?! I'm still using a 333!!
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 o
as a college tutor for math, CS/IT and English (Score:2)
Another real conversation... (Score:2)
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
Error Messages (Score:2)
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 s
Not much better than middle schoolers, actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I'm not so sure about that... I'm pretty sure most of them can utilize more technology than their parents, but I'm not at all sure that they can use it more effectively.
In terms of search (or in search terms, depending on how you look at it), a lot of older people are GREAT at using google effectively. After all, they used to have to manually search card catalogues at the library. The actual physical ti
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.