Old Man Screed

 Technology is making us dumb. There, I said it. With each new technology we have this illusion that suddenly, our intellects will soar as we use the resources available to help us build a base of knowledge and skills. But that's not what happens. Invent GPS and turn by turn directions and people stop being able to read a map. Give them a calculator and they lose the thinking skills required to do lower level math which means they lack the understanding that would be foundational to developing higher order math skills. But all of this is well known. Today, I ran into a new one.

I have assigned to my class the task of making a flyer, a hand out -- a single page which outlines a societal issue and presents a current problem, its scope, history, consequences, and like that. I told them to imaging giving it out to people -- what could they do in terms of balancing statistics and data with emotional appeals and graphic design considerations. I expected many of them to use the standard excuse of "I'm not artistic" which I can deal with. But a different one came up. Students have no idea how to work on a blank piece of paper and put together anything which isn't just a (poorly written) paragraph. They all expect to look online, find a template and just plug in some of their own data and poof, out comes a completed flyer. They don't understand when I say that a page is 8.5 by 11 inches and they don't know what to do when all the free templates are not of that size. They, for all of their supposed technological acumen, have no understanding of how a document is laid out.

Technology is not, in their minds, a means towards a more intellectually satisfying end, but an end in and of itself. If I have the internet, I assume someone has already set me up to succeed so I just have to look up someone else's completed work and tweak it. Instead of working to build the skills, they assume that all the prep work has been magically done by "the internet." They think that google, which is simply a search engine, is actually giving them answers. When I ask them why they make a claim, they say "that's what google said" as if google was an independent (and really smart) entity, not that it is a search engine simply presenting algorithm driven website lists.

Students simply don't understand what is going on -- they expect to stand on the shoulders of geniuses but don't know who the geniuses are, whether or not they are actually geniuses, or how to maintain their own balance. When I started making a personal webpage, I had to learn basic html. When I found fancier components and I wanted to lift the code from another website, I tried to figure out how it worked so I could manipulate it. Now, students don't have the skill to make anything, they just want to take what someone else made and call it their own because they lack the skills to do their own work.

Sorta sad. Kids today...sigh.