Chapter 4 - Dumbest Generation

It’s a bit ironic that I’d be reporting that online learning is failing our students in an online class. Chapter Four of “The Dumbest Generation” cites a number of sources that point to this generalization.

Included are students’ inability to identify trustworthy sources on the internet (www.ets.org/ictliteracy.org), laziness of search effort, (less than 1% of Google searches ever extend to the second page), and the inability to sort information into meaningful folders.( www.InsideHigher Ed.com)

Since 1996, when President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act which includes subsidies for technology in schools, we have thrown an increasing amount of money at hardware needs, sometimes at the expense of science equipment, field trips, and music programs. Having students involved in technology programs has not resulted in increased performance in most cases, though the students themselves seem to enjoy the process more.

The acquisition of language, which is tied to classroom success, doesn’t often come from the classroom itelf, and certainly not the online learning community. Much of the preparation work needed for academic achievement takes place in a favorite reading spot at home, discussions at dinner, or kids playing table games.

Educators and parents have put themselves on a pedestal of importance that is not real. Adolescents care much more about what other adolescents think than what the significant adults think. Add to this problem the fact that adolescents now have access to each other not just at school, but while riding in their parents’ car, at home in the evening and even into the wee hours of the morning due to the social networking given them by cell phones and the internet. Facebook, IM, and Twitter have kept people in touch, not with new influential mentors, but with the same group of middle school students through early adulthood and beyond. It’s hard to break out and become something greater when you have the anchor of your youth holding you back. This book refers to this as horizontal modeling rather than the preferred vertical modeling.

The Nielsen Norman group has spent considerable time investigating how we read, among other things, web-sites. They have found that users spend very little time searching for information that they find relevant or interesting. Online newspapers are hardly scanned. Few even read the whole headline and only 19% of the newsprint gets any attention at all. Also of concern is the lower-literacy readers skip more information than medium or high level readers.

The Nielson group makes recommendations to web publishers to keep readers engaged. This includes predictable layout, lowest level reading on the home page, ensuring a first page search engine result, paragraphs with half the word count of print material, shorter sentences and bulleted lists.

In the 18-year-old life, there are unlimited choices of things to occupy their minds. Hundreds of TV channels, video games, and web diversions. They do not have to put up with being “bored” by something as mundane as reading for fun, visiting museums, listening to “art music,” browsing a library, or joining a school club or team. We are all to blame for plunking our children/students/friends in front of a screen and failing to climb out of adolescence.