Techno Idiots, Huh?
Christopher Dawson at ZDNet’s Education IT Blog quotes an ETS study that suggests that kids are not as tech-savvy as we sometimes think. He ends his piece by saying
This ability to think critically can’t be replaced by the order of
search results in Google. It’s time to stop teaching outdated research
skills to students who will never use them. A focus on memorization in
a world where everything we need to remember is a few keystrokes away
is senseless. Rather, a curriculum that focuses intensively on the
ability to evaluate, use, and communicate a wide variety of information
is vital to creating a new generation of skilled, thoughtful members of
an information-driven society.
His post is worth some thought though I’m not certain it’s the student’s IT skills which are questionable. It’s their ability to think critically–or lack there of–that is of concern. The inability to think critically is not the fault of technology. Critical thinking and the challenge of teaching it goes back to the Greeks. What makes the ability to think critically about information so important now is that we have so much information at our finger tips. We need to be discerning users of information.
