Kids can't use computers (2013)
The author is correct when he writes, &quot;The truth is, kids can&#x27;t use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know&quot; but he goes much further than I think is really necessary or even realistic.<p>I teach at a liberal arts college and in most of my classes I devote a day or two to researching and evaluating sources. I ask them &quot;How can to determine if a web site is credible?&quot; and in every class I get a significant number of students say &quot;If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu&quot; Who is telling these kids this?<p>This week I had one class take an online survey and gave them a bit.ly link. I just cut and pasted it from bit.ly into notepad to make the font large enough that they could read it on the screen. In a class of ~35 I had 3-4 that were having problems. They were putting the url into google. At least one was typing in the &quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;&quot;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;&quot;</a> that I had just cut and pasted. Of course it was on his phone so he had to find the punctuation.<p>THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don&#x27;t have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files.<p>Of course this is not the majority of students but it is easily 1 in 10.<p>So whenever I see something about &quot;digital natives&quot; I roll my eyes. Until I have a colleague freak out about having to use the online gradebook the university is now making us use instead of a paper one because that person doesn&#x27;t know how to do it.