Serendipity35

So your students are downloading music and podcasts, uploading content, doing on-the-fly webpages, making video clips and uploading photos and videos to free servers. They are very good at using one hand on cell phone and Blackberry style keypads, using four IM windows, email and the Word document that is their homework all at once while talking on the phone - and YOU are going to teach them tech literacy?

Here's David DeBarr, instructional technology coordinator for the Scottsdale Unified School District in Scottsdale, Arizona:

“I cringe when I hear that the kids already know it all. The kids don’t know it all,” he says. “The kids know how to text message on their phones, but ask them to type a research paper and format it, they don’t know how to do that. Not many of those kids will be going into business and turning in a business proposal on a phone.”

Being able to use a computer and surf the web gives you no grasp of how it tranforms education, business, research, science and all the rest. How does Net neutrality and Google or Yahoo limiting their search for users in China affect the democracy of the Internet? Your students can't tell you. They haven't given it a thought. Did they read The World Is Flat or Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt) or Blink (Malcolm Gladwell) and discuss the ideas? You know they did not.

So do you need to teach them how to use PowerPoint or HTML? Should you ban laptops from your classroom and not allow students to use blogs and wikis for research? Should we assume they are adept with tech tools?

And keep in mind that if you teach college, the K12 world is changing much faster than higher ed. Take a look at Teaching Tech Literacy to the MySpace Generation by Chris Heun and give it some thought this summer for your fall syllabus.