The Der Spiegel article mirrors what I have seen as well with students. If
anything, I have had great discussions with students that want to downplay
knowledge of facts and past events and not make efforts to understand facts
because they feel they can always get to them on the internet if/when
needed. So, with many, there is a sense that the internet is always there to
pick-off the basics for them.
Another aspect that has been interesting for me is to see some students that
rebel against tech. Email is 'the man' and the equivalent of formal
communication that previous generations would have seen as written letters.
I have also had many discussions with people recently about how we seem to
be at another stage in technology understanding for the masses. In the early
90's, the internet was a new thing to most, complex and magical. Then, late
90's and 00's dot.com came and went trying to capitalize on the magic and
there seemed to be a greater sense of understanding of what was going on
behind the scenes of webservers, websites, etc. because that level had not
been abstracted yet. Now, we have that level of abstraction with cloud
computing, Facebook, Wordpress and other common tech people interact with
and generate content with but not really know what is going on behind the
scenes. I think the 'net generation' is really now just riding this for the
most part. They do FB and other tech but are hitting the tech at a level
where they can get their needs defined for them (social sites, share pics,
etc.) and then they can play with it and move on. There is no need or sense
to get deeper understanding of the ramifications or the fact, for example,
that the website loads so slow and we need broadband because the site is
inundated with analytics to serve ads to pay the bills so they can dish the
services for free. Fads come and go and websites are fads in many respects
to them like fashion and music, so deep investment in those is minimal in
general.
Email? Why setup and email server and see the tech behind it or how it
works? Just get a free Gmail account or Yahoo! account? The school the
student is in probably did that too. Webserver? Why setup your own webserver
when we can just host it at Google Sites or something? Sure, the
functionality is limited but if you don't know that, a website = what Google
Sites or another cloud service provides for you. It isn't exactly what I
want, but it is free and took me a few minutes to setup and I can abandon it
if I grow tired of it.
When we look at tech as free/no charge it also sends a message to them, I
feel, as lack of investment because they are probably just disposable. Ning
and Google discussions on this list and others come to mind. Technology and
the internet as a commodity was bound to happen and it has for the most part
and treating it as such breeds this sense of indifference. Mix that with
assumed anonymity and identity issues they probably have when online and the
overall minimal sense of investment/importance is understood. Anyway, just
my experience but the Der Spiegal article hits it on many levels from what I
have seen and glad it was mentioned on the list. I read it Sunday AM and it
stirred some thoughts for sure over coffee.
Jonathan
................................
Jonathan Mergy <jmergy@lwhs.org>
Director Of Technology
Lick-Wilmerding High School
755 Ocean Ave, SF CA 94112
P:415.585.1725 x365
http://www.lwhs.org
> From: Keith E Gatling <keith@gatling.us>
> Reply-To: ISED-L <ISED-L@listserv.syr.edu>
> Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2010 09:46:51 -0400
> To: ISED-L <ISED-L@listserv.syr.edu>
> Subject: Re: Article: "Kids that grew up with the Internet are not 'digital
> natives'"
>
> I agree with you 100% here. Historically the librarians were always the ones
> who taught us how to do research, even when we thought we had a pretty good
> handle on how to use the old World Book already. There are adults (and
> teachers) who don't have good research skills, so why should we assume that
> students have them automatically simply because they've grown up with the
> Internet?
>
> Heck, I remember that when my father taught me about the microfilm readers
> at the public library, it opened up a whole new world for me!
>
> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 8:58 AM, SUZANNE J FELDBERG <sulata@mac.com> wrote:
>
>> In response to David's comments on navigating databases...I beg to differ.
>> Learning to navigate and make proper use of online databases and digital
>> information is where school librarians should be stepping in. If librarians
>> in your school aren't teaching these skills I would find out why. A school
>> librarian is trained to teach how to disseminate information be it online or
>> on paper. They also should be teaching (in this context) about plagiarism,
>> the difference between a website and a database, and how to conduct a
>> successful search for information.
>>
>> I realize that it is tough for teachers to give up time to librarians to
>> work with students on these goals, but as we all know, collaboration is key
>> to our student's success.
>>
>> Suzanne Feldberg
>> Upper School Librarian
>> Albuquerque Academy
>
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