Are College Students Techno Idiots?
Susan Metros, a professor of design technology at Ohio State University, says that reading, writing and arithmetic are simply not enough for today’s students. What is important for learners is information: how to find it, how to focus it, and how to filter out nonsense. But for many students, their main source for information is Google, which Metros finds troubling. Last year, she was surprised to learn at a conference that most people look only at the first few hits that come back from a Google query. In fact, only a tiny percentage of Google users even bother to glance at the second page of the search results. “It is well below 1 percent ,” she said. Overreliance on Google is only one of many technology problems facing college students. A new report released Tuesday by the Educational Testing Service finds that students lack many basic skills in information literacy, which ETS defines as the ability to use technology to solve information problems. The original impetus for the study c
