Digital natives

Brad King makes the argument that there are no digital natives, and that college students are basically clueless about computes.  I think he may be right.

The theory of the “digital native” is that kids today have grown up around computers and learned how to use them instinctively, the way they learn to speak their native languages.

Of course, one only has to read a couple of college freshman papers to realize that even with 12 years of schooling, a lot of students have no mastery of English.  So it should come as no surprise that most college students have no idea how to do anything other than play games and use Facebook on their computers, and perhaps use their word processors, though often they seem not to have figured out how to use the spelling checker or be able to create cross references and tables of contents—some of the most fundamental operations of the programs.

If you want students to use computers in a more sophisticated way, like writing a computer program to analyze data or creating a web page that accesses data from a database, then you need to give them explicit instruction, and lots of it.

Some students have found useful tools on the computers or on the web, and gotten proficient at using them.  A smaller set have created new tools or made improvements to existing tools.  These students should be treasured, as they are much rarer than you might think.