What's Making Me Gritch This Morning

I should never, ever read the newspaper. I know that. I KNOW that. And I hardly ever do. Well, except on Sundays. And except the headlines.

Which is where I made my mistake this morning, when I brought in the paper for The EGE and saw this: "OMG! Teachers getting in touch with 'net generation'"--and, by the way, that's exactly how the headline looks. I like capitalization in headlines, just like in titles, but that's just me.

You can read the article here, but what it's about is some Central Texas schools that are allowing cell phone use in the classroom and setting up classroom Twitter accounts and giving students book report assignments that are 140 characters or fewer (and thankyoujesus for not saying "or less").

What set me off about this is this:  just because you have a Twitter account and a Facebook account and maybe a blog does not--let me be clear: DOES NOT--make you technologically savvy. This article seems to argue that these new educational experiments are all about bringing more technology into the classroom (they want to provide netbooks for students) and taking advantage of the skills kids have developed through their use of social media.

This is crap. One, it's not proactive, trying to teach kids to use skills that will help them learn. It's reactive:  kids are bringing cell phones to school (80%, they say, which probably means it's more like 95%), and teachers and administrators can't keep them from doing it, so they've got to come up with a way to make it seem like they have some control. Like it was their idea all along. Right.

And here's the real gripe:  just because you have a smart phone and can text at the speed of lightning, that doesn't mean you're technologically savvy, either. Teachers--and most adults over the age of 35--are intimidated by technology. They see kids and teens and young adults with a smart phone welded to their hand and think, "OMG, they're so far ahead of me, there's not way I can ever catch up."

I know lots of these people. They've got the phone right there, all the time. They own a laptop. They're online for a large portion of their day. They can tell you what's happening in the world at any time--they get the news and the gossip and the sports scores as they're happening. But--BUT--if I call or text or email one of these people and ask them how to create an animated .gif for my website, or how to create and upload a secure PDF for an online class, or how to create a different title background in iMovie, none of them has a clue. Not a clue. They don't know advanced word processing or anything about video streaming. They can't tell me how to change an .avi to a .mp4 and whether just changing the extension by hand will make it usable or whether changing the extension for audio from .mp3. to .aiff and back again can be done manually and, if so, what exactly am I doing when I do that?

In short, they understand actual technology no better--and, in many cases, much, much less--than I do, and I'm old enough to be their grandmother. Whereas I spend much of my computer-related time trying to figure out ways to do cool stuff--create more interesting movies, create content--text, photos--that I can share online--they spend their time communicating and sharing gossip. I'm sure they'd argue that it's not gossip, but from what I've heard them talk about, that's pretty much all it is:  gossip about other people.

And the schools think this is technology. Just knowing how to turn on a computer and get online doesn't mean we're going anywhere. It doesn't mean we've got a whole couple of generations of people who are ready to write code and take the next step in our race to keep up (snort:  read "catch up") with the rest of the technologically-savvy world. You know, the countries where they learn to do math and write code and can pinpoint their hometown on an actual map.

I like what Leo McGarry said in The West Wing, that the internet's biggest use is as a delivery system for gossip and porn. I think that's true:  cut out those two functions, and hardly anyone would be online. What would be the point?

So, yeah, I'm gritching this morning. I'm gritching because people justify the things they do with specious arguments, and because people are lazy and uncurious, because the young people I know are more interested in games and gossip than they are in new ideas and learning how to do cool stuff. And I'm gritching because too many women my age think they're too old to use a computer for more than paying bills, and because there was that line in the article about how girls are more likely to contribute to classroom discussions if they can answer online, rather than raising their hands and answering in class, and that makes me think that they're either intimidated by being in a classroom full of boys (which makes my brain start to sizzle) OR that they don't want to look smart in front of their friends, and then that makes me think of the girls who don't want to look too smart and the black kids who get teased for looking smart and how so many of us don't want to look too smart and the total dumbing down of EVERYTHING and WHY IS THAT?

I think I'd better stop now. I think I smell smoke inside my head.