Blabberize

Blabber Quote

The Dumbest Generation Animoto created by Mary Larscheid

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The Dumbest Generation Book Reflection

The Dumbest Generation discusses the downfall of a fast-paced, digital age. The continuous point that the book describes we have advanced technologically; however, educationally it is the inverse. Students no longer know history, nor do they have a desire to learn the classics. They simply do not care, rather instead they would like to Facebook or text. Adults are not becoming adults until later in life, many twenty-some year olds are back living with their parents and not taking active responsibility for his or her life. Simply banking off of his/her parents is the common twenty-year olds life.
Fast-paced is the way the youth and young adults expect everything to work. Very few people are taking the time to read books; rather they just simply “Google it.” Another concern that the Bauerlein brings to point is the increasing amount of the population that is narcissistic. As the book points out, two-thirds of US under graduates are scoring above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. With more people scoring higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, he points to lower levels of pro-civic and pro-social values. The youth simply lacks a clear direction and desire to help others.
After reading the book, I agree with some points that the author makes; however, I feel that the book goes to extreme levels to leave a negative mark on the youth. Stating that the youth is fairly narcissistic, is a truly accurate statement. Working within the classroom has allowed me to see that, as a teacher, many of my students do have an attitude of carelessness. From my perspective, I feel this change has occurred because a lot of youth lack clear supervision and leadership from home. Schools can try to teach; however, students are most impacted by their own family members. Parents need to set high expectations, as not to deviate to a level where they feel they need to be friends with their kids; rather instead do what is best for his or her child’s future. Every child deserves the right to value education and actively seek out knowledge from the past and present to make him or her better citizens. As parents, teachers, schools, and community members we all need to work together to teach children to value all education, not just technology education in order to be a complete educated being.

Reflection - Bart Torbert

Reflection – “The Dumbest Generation”

As a skeptic of technology as a better way to educate, I found myself nodding in agreement with much of this book. Do I think things are as bad as the author Mark Baurlein thinks? Probably not.

I am worried, not about the vast number of hours spent on the internet, but the things that aren’t being done while we mindlessly check our Facebook for the 30^th time of the day (or 300^th?) The social universe that we spend so much time on, has reached such a level of importance that the good things that can be done on the internet (research, drill and practice) are not done well, if at all.

I think Mr. Bauerlein has done effectively what he claims our current group of scholars are not doing; making strong decisions about facts that he has carefully researched. The book is full of references to research (maybe too full?) and the superlatives he uses in his conclusions are troubling to those who believe him word for word.

My daughter has a blog that is actually read by a relatively large group of friends. I find it informative, and fun, but wonder why it is on the internet for YOU to read. Our pages and pages of self-authored information about ourselves, proves Mr.Bauerlein’s point that we are narcissistic and should probably be reading more worthwhile authors.

One of the advantages of being old is that I’ve seen stupid things come and go. Popped collars, Bermuda shorts, the XFL football league, Michael Jordan playing baseball come to mind. I feel that I will outlive the digital age. I think teachers with a pulse and face-to-face conversation will be valued and we will use our computers for what they do best.

I hope.

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.

Dumbest Generation Reflection, Reva Potter

I chose this book for my book study because my son owns a copy and it was handy. My son is fifteen and had not finished the book, and now I know why. He probably could not get past some of the statistical information in the beginning without the bullets, headlines, and graphics he loves so much, being a member of a pretty spatially-enhanced upbringing.

But I would like him to read it one day. We would have a lot to talk about. The text-rich environment of his upbringing (his mother is an English teacher after all) make reading and writing and test-taking easy for him. He also is very tech-savvy (obsessed?) and uses most of the usual social networks. His Facebook page is full of all the silly stuff the author laments in the book, and I know he is a truly shallow adolescent at times. But the Internet has also allowed him to experience more intellectual pursuits along with the shallow ones. He is a pretty good researcher for his classes, critical of websites and their authors; he consults the Internet for further information when he is reading something unfamiliar; he consults the Internet for classical music and pieces for oral interp competition; he looks up background information on new authors he is reading and new musicians he finds interesting. So far, I do not see a dangerous member of the Dumbest Generation in the making.
Is my teenager so unusual? This book makes me worried that he is. Sometimes so do the ridiculous additions my middle school students put on their IGoogle pages. So do the terrible habits students have when accepting Internet garbage as research, especially when students from most grade levels think that cutting and pasting text from an article and then “changing some words” is not plagiarism. So many things in this book really struck me at the teaching level, worrying me some, and justifying some of the worries I have already developed in the last 17 years of teaching.

I agree with Bauerlein on a number of points. The Internet and the constant social connections to peers allow them to detrimentally isolate themselves within their peer group. Most students have a disconnect with adults and are often offended that adults think they know more. This may be typical adolescent thinking, but we have not done students any favors by solidifying their thinking when we believe that students know more about using technology than the teachers. They may be able to navigate tools, but thoughtful use of tech tool requires mentoring and advising – the responsibility of teachers.

Bauerlein’s issues with screen time and lack of reading also hit home for me. I agree that vocabulary is a major issue in our culture. It is becoming a dividing line between students who will succeed at their goals and students who will not. It is impacting our students’ abilities to take tests, to critically understand information, and to express their thinking. The statistics on vocabulary, comparing print and screen sources, was astounding to me. No wonder students wait for me to explain directions two or more ways after they read them for themselves; they do not have the vocabulary confidence to know what to do. My hope is that as a language arts teacher, I am using technology to improve vocabulary, showing students tools such as visual thesaurus and the components of online dictionaries to make them better consumers of online vocabulary tools.

This book raises implication about how teachers may want to approach the validity of technology use in their classrooms. When we use tech tools, we have to be aware that we also need to teach the tech tool. It would be a rare middle school student who is an expert researcher online – this needs to be taught. A middle school student will probably not create a Prezi with advanced vocabulary unless the teacher requires this. Student authors will not collaborate in Google Docs with valid editing comments unless these are mentored and modeled. The Dumbest Generation may be happy to stay that way, but their teachers should not be happy to let them.