Kids can't use computers (2013)
The author is correct when he writes, "The truth is, kids can't use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know" 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 "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" 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 "<a href="http://"" rel="nofollow">http://"</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'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 "digital natives" 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't know how to do it.