Are Students Today Technologically Savvy?

Last updated on: July 16, 2010 at 9:36 am by James F. McGrath

Are Students Today Technologically Savvy? 2010-07-16T09:36:00-04:00 James F. McGrath

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The term “technological natives” gets used by professors from time to time, often in reference to the alleged gap between professors and students when it comes to technology.

It is true that there are older professors who really have not kept up to date at all. One example that comes to mind is a philosophy adjunct professor I met several years ago who had a rotary phone.

But the stereotype doesn’t work for all professors in a certain age bracket, and neither does it work for all students today, as I discovered, for instance, when a very significant number of students that I asked to blog in a course recently confessed to never having blogged before.

Here’s a quote from an article that appeared today in Inside Higher Education:

“Students generally begin research projects with great enthusiasm, but their first impulse is to cruise the Internet to assemble the sort of anecdote-laden rhetorical argument that’s become the white noise of American discourse. It’s our job to help them match what they believe about a subject with what the experts in their disciplines know (or theorize).”

That quote seems to me to intersect with the theme of another article in the same publication, entitled “Technologically Illiterate Students.” It suggests that students are in fact completely proficient in those technologies that it is now realistic to expect everyone to be proficient in. Knowing minimal computer skills is no more exciting than the ability to use a telephone, or a TV, or a microwave. And when it comes to being able to not merely do what everyone can, but to use technology in specific ways to accomplish specific academic aims, students cannot be assumed to have the necessary skills.

These are things I’ll be focusing on in particular in a freshman class I’ll be teaching for the first time this coming academic year. I’ve been given the opportunity to try reading one of the assigned texts on iPads. I have no doubt that they will find using the device second nature. But when it comes to actually using iPads or any other devices they have access to so as to find reliable information, for instance, we should not assume that students have the skills they need. And so I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to help them move past the basic stage that they will all find easy, using technology, to the more advanced stage of using technology to learn, to discuss, to critically engage texts and ideas, and to locate reliable sources of information and utilize them in constructing an argument of their own.

What is the experience of other readers? In what ways are students today “savvy” when it comes to technology, and what skills do professors often make the mistake of assuming students will have, when in fact they are unlikely to?

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