Every so often, I’m starting to see a critical swell of the whole technology obsession in education. Here’s a great piece about how, despite being touted as the Millennial generation, college students and younger are really technologically illiterate. Sure, they can text, post status updates, maybe even upload a video to Youtube. But that’s not really sophisticated stuff. I can recall many undergraduates who could not even use Powerpoint at the start of the semester, which is a pretty basic program that’s been around for years. Also, despite knowing all the latest lingo like TTYL or OMG or STFU that helps young people text at the speed of insane, seems like our youth still considers Wikipedia a reliable source from which to write research documents. They still don’t know about plagiarism, how we can easily detect it in some cases. Even though some students use expensive interactive white boards, I don’t see real sophisticated use of them, like using the screen recording function, embedding videos, or using desktop flip charts to analyze text features on a webpage. This is certainly our responsibility as teacher educators, but maybe it’s partly our fault for assuming that because they were born with the internet they actually know how to use it to their advantage and not be totally run over by it.
Youth today only see the convenience of technology. They only take advantage of the fact that everything can be done quickly. Searching for something in the internet is as easy as ABC. Cutting and pasting an article is what most students do, hence the number of cases of plagiarism. The youth need to realize that technology isn’t just about speed. Yes, it is the responsibility of educators to teach the youth on how to take advantage of technology and not to abuse it.