LIBE 467: Post 4

Classmate Lenora makes an important statement about our goals as TLs when our jobs are becoming more and more complex due to the multitude of media that students use on a regular basis:

“It is still questionable whether students are ‘technically literate’ and other skills such as problem solving/thinking skills may have been neglected.”

At issue here is the notion that students “use computers” all the time, but that a couple of problems tend to arise in the process:

• The computer use that students engage in may be very limited in scope—limited to games, social media, and basic Google searches, for example. When students use computers often but only for a very few repetitive tasks, we might be under the impression that the student is “technically literate”—because we SEE the student engaged in computer use so frequently—but to do so puts forth a very limited definition of “literacy.” One of the dangers of this situation is that teachers may assume that students have a deep and functional understanding of computers in general when that is in fact far from the case; the danger, then, would be that teachers and TLs would neglect to teach students the important technical and technological skills that they need because the teachers and TLs assume the students “already know it.” What we don’t want to do is produce a generation of human beings capable of turning on a computer…and only using Facebook, Skype, World of Warcraft, and a Google search that lands them on Wikipedia for 90% of their queries.

• The type of computer use described above does nothing (or very little) to encourage and develop the critical thinking skills necessary to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information. Such skills are essential when dealing with any mode of literature or information, and likely even more essential today and in the near future as the ways in which students access and interact with information are becoming more varied—the challenges students face today are around how to navigate through and assess the quality of the figurative piles of information available online, and how to successfully evaluate the provenance of each information source. What we don’t want is a generation of human beings who assume that information that is “relevant” according to Google’s standards—a match based on perhaps one facet of a keyword search that crawls the entire Internet—is information that is also valuable, reliable, or marked by wisdom in any way.