Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Digital generation???

(Interesting to note that this is talking about American students)

[from the Chronicle of HE]
NOT ALL YOUNG PEOPLE ARE TECH-SAVVY: Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a "digital generation," writes Siva Vaidhyanathan.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i04/04b00701.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en


user name: rulibrary
password: ru2007

Exceprt:
Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.
College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page. What kids, like the rest of us, don't like is the price of books.
Of course they use Google, but not very well — just like my 75-year-old father. And they fill the campus libraries at all hours, just as Americans of all ages are using libraries in record numbers. (According to the American Library Association, visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent from 1994 to 2004).

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