Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure while I’m on vacation.
I was never concerned as to whether or not today’s school-age kids were going to be considered fully functioning adults someday; anyone who can seemingly mind-meld with a computer (or a cell phone or anything gizmo-ish), understand it, and make it work is probably going to do just fine once they’re let loose on the world.
Despite feeling that kids these days were good to go on the technology front, I was a wee bit worried that the whole writing portion of their lives was headed for much suckage. I was caught in the admittedly old-fashioned (lame!) idea that all forward progress in the land of tech can only lead to less and less well-rounded humans. The telephone, for instance, led to a severe decline in letter-writing. (Of course, the electric light bulb led to everyone staying up later and getting more work done, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)
Clive Thompson’s article in Wired has calmed me down. Thanks to all the e-mail and texting that goes on these days, kids are doing more writing than anyone has since correct cursive and perfect penmanship were qualities to strive for. Now we’ve got technologically savvy kids who can express themselves with the written/typed word like nobody’s business. I’m stoked that society will not be taking one-way trips in any hand baskets.
The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
Screwed anyone over publicly lately? Virally or plain old socially? Don’t be an ass@#$%. Pay attention to what you’re putting out there. Nikki Massaro Kauffman at .eduGuru wrote an enlightening and educational post about Teaching Privacy: Friends Don’t Let Friends Post to Facebook.
From the post:
I’ve been wanting to do a post about some of the privacy training I’ve been doing for faculty and staff since the last time Facebook updated its privacy policy. It’s hard to keep track of when, where, and how many times Facebook has changed its privacy policy. But this is not a post about quitting Facebook. It’s not a how-to on tweaking your privacy either.
We are constantly learning how to handle our relationships and privacy. Preschoolers eventually learn that they can’t blurt out every observation they make lest they reveal a surprise or offend someone. School aged children eventually learn that keeping a friend’s secret is more important than gossip. Adults wrestle with the ethics of keeping a confidence over revealing a truth. All of our struggles with privacy are hard enough when we’re just talking about the ethical issues of face-to-face communication. But now we’ve supplied an arsenal of communication tools to everyone with a computer and access to the Internet. More…
Researchers analyzed 30,000 teens and the relationship between screen time (tv, video games, surfing the net, etc.) and the teens’ tendency toward experiencing routine backache and headaches. The study was just released, and the findings boil down to this: cumulative screen time, even in young, healthy bodies, causes headaches and back pain.
I’m pretty sure this can easily be applied to college students and full-fledged adults as well. Ergonomics, massage therapy, and a reduction in screen time: Know it. Live it. Love it.
One more reason to be paranoid and mistrusting: virus-writing bastards who want to send their flying monkeys out to the ether and into your helpless, naïve little computer, wrecking college, career, and any hope of a happy future for you and your currently non-existent spouse and children. How could you let this happen? When are you going to grow up and take responsibility for all factors within your control?
Not yet paranoid enough to make you feel the urge to be responsible? Watch this SANS security expert discussing security issues with modern technological gadgetry:
A year ago I was writing and reading wretchedly hopeless posts and articles about newly graduated MBAs who could not get jobs and were swarming back to their recently ditched high school digs to cite the Home is where they have to take you when you don’t have anywhere else to go! rule to their confused parents. Parents who had long since turned their kid’s bedroom into a taxidermist’s suite.
The job market still blows for MBAs (and almost everyone else). But it’s managed to move ever so slightly up the flagpole of income opportunity. I’d say it’s improved at least three eighths of an inch.
According to the Wall Street Journal[link], the meek and the less-than networked will be living on the streets or pursuing another career entirely. Any freshly MBA-ed twenty-something who wants to fulfill their business destiny has to be willing to network to the nth degree, drive the networking and coffee-buying machine, and work their pants off to even get one cup’s worth of sit-down face time with a breathing human who may (or may not) lead to an interview.
In the interest of acquiring the motivational energy required for pursuing a business career in this economy, I would advise first nailing down the minimum wage job most capable of making you loathe yourself and every sunrise you witness. Possibly the best launching pad available is hitting bottom and having to scrounge around in the slimy muck for a while. Which situation makes you run faster? The beautiful cornfields you pass on your evening jog? Or the pissed-off bull someone forgot to latch the gate on, that is now hell-bent on obliterating you on the lame-ass, country-road asphalt of life?
Basically what it comes down to is this: If you’re sniffing flowers and pondering sunsets and saying, “Aww…pretty!” you are not ready to traject (I made that word up). But if you’re hating your bull moment so intensely that you’re running fast enough to leave the words, “Son of a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii*ch!” far behind you, then you, my friend, are ready for the real world and will be kicking much business-world butt.
If you require more advice and fewer asterisks, please refer to the helpful articles below.
Wired magazine calls him “the explainer.” Michael Wesch is a social anthropologist who teaches at Kansas State University. In his 15-minute TED talk, he explains the effects of media (social and otherwise) on learners, on humanity, and on the classroom environment.
Wesch also manages to squeeze in a bit telling other educators how to take advantage of all the media and the technology humans have available as a way to make students more “knowledge-able” than just knowledgeable. It’s not just memorizing facts and theories anymore—all the information is out there, students need to learn how to find it and ponder it and bring their own thoughts and theories to the table.
Watch it. It takes about 15 minutes; that’s less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee. And no way one cup of caffeine will blow your mind like Michael Wesch can.
Simplify the high-tech messaging portion of your super busy life. If you’ve got messages coming in and going out from several directions all at once, it’s likely you’ll end up scattered and cranky. Or you’ll chuck all messaging devices and end up living on the perfect island I’ve already set aside for my own future use.
Back off my island, chucklehead, and please try Sendible. Here’s what their site promises to deliver:
Schedule email, sms and social network messages ahead of time
Access all your email and social network contacts from one place
Remind yourself and others of upcoming tasks and events
Post status updates to your blogging and social network accounts
I prefer old-school paper and ink for myself, but I’m in complete agreement with his statement. And I envy the generation that came into the world right after my Gen-X cohort; they were born already marinated in tech-savvy. They knew it because the collective consciousness had just finished learning it. Anything beyond word processing I had to figure out as a twenty-year-old in 1993.
Technology doesn’t evolve backwards; computers aren’t going to go away, and the kids who are comfortable swimming through the digital landscape will have an easier time now and a decade on. Teach them how to be safe and smart on the Net the same way you taught them to ride a bike, cross the street, and deal with strangers. Keep in mind that newness is usually met with fear and anger. Suck it up and let your kids learn something.
don’t teach your kids to read
for the Web
to scan
RSS
aggregate
synthesize
don’t teach your kids to write
online
pen and paper aren’t going anywhere
since when do kids need an audience?
no need to hyperlink
make videos
audio
Flash
no connecting, now
no social networking
or online chat
or comments
or PLNs
blogs and twitter?
how self-absorbed
what a bunch of crap
and definitely, absolutely, resolutely, no cell phones
block it all
lock it down
keep it out
it’s evil, you know
there’s bad stuff out there
gotta keep your children safe
don’t you know collaboration is just another word for cheating?
don’t you know how much junk is out there?
haven’t you ever heard of sexting?
of cyberbullying?
a computer 24-7? no thanks
I don’t want them
creating
sharing
thinking
learning
you know they’re just going to look at porn
and hook up with predators
we can’t trust them
don’t do any of it, please
really
’cause I’m doing all of it with my kids
can’t wait to see who has a leg up in a decade or two
can you?
Again I say: there but for the grace of All Things Holy go I. A phone call to my parental units might be in order so I can thank them excessively for bringing me into this world at a time when computers took up entire rooms, tiny technology was available only in science fiction books, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook hadn’t yet been conceived of.
By no means was I an over-the-top party girl in high school or college, but I feel confident that had the technology been in place, I could have certainly captured some detrimental moments for posterity. Any number of which, I can guarantee, would somehow, somewhere, have been unearthed by a prospective employer.
Bowling Green’s online newspaper has an article up about the increasingly standard use employers make of sites like Facebook and MySpace to screen job applicants. I don’t agree with the practice, and part of me feels like it’s an invasion of privacy for employers to go digging around online for information. Which brings me around to the impossible-to-refute point that nothing posted online where the whole world can see it can be considered personal or private.
It sucks that teens and twenty-somethings have to work harder that any other generation since the Victorian age to mind their reputations, but all this technology is probably here to stay. Don’t put s**t out there that you don’t want people to see. Like all things logical, it’s elegant in its simplicity. So either keep your proverbial pants on or mark the “friends only” box on your chosen social networking site. Good luck.
UCLA does an annual survey of incoming American undergrads.
The CIRP Freshman Survey is part of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) and is administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. The 2007 freshman norms are based on the responses of 272,036 first-time, full-time students at 356 of the nation’s baccalaureate colleges and universities. The data have been statistically adjusted to reflect the responses of the 1.4 million first-time, full-time students entering four-year colleges and universities as freshmen in 2007.
The 2007 results came out recently and the info on helicopter parenting has me concerned. Either we’ve all been wrong about helicopter parents and their over-involvement in their kids’ education, or the young’uns in question like being helicoptered. Here’s what the survey found out about
Parental Involvement:
While college officials nationwide say they have seen an increase in parents who are heavily involved in the college experiences of their children, a strong majority of today’s college freshmen believe their parents are involved the “right amount,” according to UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s entering undergraduates.
The report suggests freshmen show a dependency on parents when making college-related decisions.
“When parents intervene in their children’s college life and decision-making, students may not necessarily develop their own problem-solving skills, which may limit developmental gains in their learning experiences,” said John H. Pryor, a co-author of the report and director of CIRP.
A majority of freshmen considered their parents’ participation in their college careers to be the “right amount,” with 84 percent reporting the “right amount” of parental involvement in their decision to go to college, 80.5 percent in their decision to attend the college at which they enrolled and 77.5 percent in dealing with college officials.
Conversely, nearly one in four freshmen (24 percent) report that their parents displayed “too little” involvement in helping them select college courses, and 22.5 percent say their parents were not involved enough in helping choose college activities.
Along with parental involvement, the survey also covered:
“Habits of Mind” for Learning:
The report identifies a troubling pattern in students’ study habits for lifelong learning. While a large majority of freshmen report that they use the Internet on a daily basis to seek information, only a few within the classroom are cultivating the essential “habit of mind” of checking the accuracy and reliability of the information they receive.
“Students’ frequent use of the Internet shows a preference for information that is easily accessible, but that information is not necessarily reliable and accurate,” Hurtado said. “Learning how to evaluate knowledge claims is an essential part of a liberal education, and we expect that colleges will have to be more intentional about integrating information literacy in the education of college students today.”
Impact of Social Networking Sites:
While the popularity of social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace runs high — 86.3 percent of incoming freshmen report that during the last year of high school they spent at least some time on such sites each week — students still spend relatively more time in an average week studying, working and “live” socializing.
Time spent on social networking sites appears, however, to be related not to less “live” socializing but to more time spent in other social activities. Students who used social networking Web sites more often were also more likely to socialize with friends and attend parties. This did not seem to have any significant impact on the number of hours a week students spent studying.
Diversity-Related Issues:
Attitudes about diversity continue to change among incoming first-year students: 36.7 percent of students expressed the personal goal of helping to promote racial understanding, a 2.7 percentage-point increase from 2006 and the highest this figure has been since 1994. Not surprisingly, the figure escalates among students at black colleges and universities, where 64 percent see this as an essential or very important personal goal.
Interest in the global community is advancing as well. When this item was first placed on the questionnaire in 2002, following the attacks of Sept. 11, 43.2 percent of students reported that they had an interest in improving their understanding of other countries and cultures; in 2007 that proportion became a majority, at 52.3 percent.
Freshman support for same-sex marriages has expanded steadily, from 50.9 percent 1997 to 63.5 percent in 2007. The issue, however, reveals a wide gender gap: 55.3 percent of male freshmen report that same-sex couples should have the right to legal marital status, compared with 70.3 percent of female students. Gender differences appear on other issues, as well: More than half of all males (53.7 percent) agree with the statement that undocumented immigrants should be denied access to public education, compared with 43.5 percent of all female students; 43.3 percent of males and 39.2 percent of females at black colleges agreed.
Reasons to Attend College:
Academic quality remained the top reason for choosing a college, cited by 63 percent of students — a 5.6 percentage-point jump from 2006 and the highest this figure has been in 35 years. And college affordability is now more than ever a priority for students, with the importance of being awarded financial assistance increasing 5.1 percentage points from 2006 to 39.4 percent in 2007, also the highest this figure has been in 35 years.
