Serendipity35

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Interestingly, the post opens with this:

Earlier this year, a Midwest bank manager told me about a youth market survey the bank had conducted on youngsters and technology. The survey revealed that while youngsters were "Internet-savvy" and attracted to mobile banking, when it came to making critical decisions about finance, they weren't so savvy. They relied on word of mouth from their parents and friends and limited their Internet searches to well-known search engines like Google or Yahoo.

The bank welcomed the news because it meant that marketing dollars could be funneled into just a handful of Internet channels. But these survey results also raise other questions.

It's important to note that this is a bank marketing to kids, not educators talking about students, and a business (banking) that we don't immediately associate with marketing to kids. But they are interested in kids' Net skills. So, let's turn the question to education.

I agree that kids are "Internet-savvy," but that term doesn't mean that they have those critical thinking skills and information literacy skills that we want of them as our students. In fact, I would argue that those who want to market to kids and adults would actually prefer that students not have those skills. In marketing, a savvy consumer may be more likely to purchase, but a truly knowledgeable consumer may be to likely to see through the hype and actually be discerning.

When my study and teaching was more focused on media, there was a lot of time spent in making students more than just viewers and consumers of film and video. I tried to make them creators. I trained them to be critical viewers. I suppose it was an earlier read/write movement in media. Visual literacy was a term that was used. And there were many studies showing us that the media was just rolling over kids and they were taking it all in with very little discretion.

I grew up in the age of television and my parents and teachers were continually being told that television would destroy my brain, reading, education and culture. It didn't, but I continued to hear that tirade through my own college years when I studied media. I recall a few long research papers I did on the impact of television on reading and writing.

Shacklett's post lists 5 important skills kids need just for Internet search:

1. Effectively developing the right search questions and topics
2. Being able to locate information
3. Critically evaluating the usefulness of information
4. Synthesizing information to answer questions, and
5. Communicating results to others.

We can all add items to the list - using advanced search, other search tools, knowing how to assess the websites for accuracy and authenticity and others - that would take savvy surfers to another level.

Is this gap of Internet-savvy but lacking Internet skills a real one?  What skills are they most lacking? How different is this from earlier fears of films, comic books, television, videogames and computers ruining kids?

Related

• Literacy? Which one?
• NCTE's New Literacies
• Partnership for 21st Century Skills
• Apple Learning Exchange 21st Century Learning Collection