Masters of Technology?
A new report, sponsored by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, debunks the myth that young people are “masters of technology,” finding that while teens may have the basic technology skills to use tools like search engines, they lack the information processing and higher order thinking skills necessary to really use them effectively. Apparently these young people don’t know how to select and use proper search terms, nor do they have good skills in evaluating the information that they find online. According to the report, the greatest difficulty is getting these kids to realize that they have a problem–their self-reported levels of competence do not match with their actual performance.
On all these issues, I’d argue that “adults” aren’t much better. For example, according to a Boost eLearning survey:
39 percent of all Google searches fail, leading to more than 40 hours – or one week – of lost productivity per user per year. The online survey found that respondents perform about 12 searches per day and, statistically, 4.7 of those searches do not obtain the desired results. Respondents also report that they spend an average of 30.8 minutes per day searching online. The reported amount of time lost on each search that does not deliver the desired result equates to 12 minutes per day – or 46 hours annually. In addition to lost productivity, a high search-failure rate also indicates that a user’s current research results are likely incomplete, leading to missed opportunities, the value of which could far exceed any time lost.
I’ve also been on the receiving end of many reports, presentations, blog posts, etc. that are based on poorly understood information found online, and in my experience, a lot of these people consider themselves to be pretty information savvy.
We’re all dealing with an information tsunami and work that requires an ability to find, manage, sort through, evaluate and synthesize information from a wide variety of sources. These are generally not skills that we’ve been taught, so we need to figure out how to learn them for ourselves, not just the teens in the classroom, but also the adults in the workplace.
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September 13th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
This is not surprising. Adults granted technical “Mastery” status to youth by default. Many adults did not/do not understand the digital culture and it’s devices, so they conferred competence on those who did what they cannot.
Further, there is little credible evidence that the net and it’s related infrastructure contribute to cognitive learning.
Some years ago a colleague chastised me for stating that the net is basically the province of the educated elites. That most use this environment for social/commerce/entertainment and communications. Little else. These studies in part support that assertion.
In the early 90’s former IBM Chief Sam Palmissano said that corporations that are not considering setting up an in house “university” or some such “knowledge worker” environment— risked being marginalized.
Employers have to make continuing education with mandatory work literacy achievements routine for advancement. If not….mediocrity will reign!
Thanks for the interesting post!
mike whatley
altadena, ca
September 14th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Kia ora Michele!
Your reporting here matches well with my observational experience of young people and of adults.
There is a difference between executing a search from entered data and executing a search with criteria that some considered analysis has been applied in selecting. But as Mike Whatley says above, if you don’t know any better and don’t know how to perform a search, you think that anyone who can return a search result is a master of the technology.
It takes a deal of critical thinking to select relevant criteria for a search. My experience is that most adults who think they know a thing or two about technology cannot do a decent Google search.
I’d go a few stages further and say that MOST people in the workplace know only the perifery of how to utilise the technology they are given. I call it the skin effect. To some extent the technology is designed that way, to show a skin that reveals only a veneer of the application’s true functionality.
In a recent workshop that I facilitated for teachers, it was obvious that more than half of those present could not tell the difference between the search line in Google, and the address line.
Most did not have a clue what the function of the address line was, let alone understand what had to be done with the search line to achieve a useful return. Yet Internet search applications have been available on PCs in the workplace for more than a decade.
The presumption that one must be stupid not to be able to use all this simple technology, prohibits some adults from asking questions that may assist them to learn. At the other end of the scale are the young people who think they know all about it and wouldn’t want to listen to advice - ’twas ever thus.
Ka kite
from Middle-earth
September 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Like Ken and Mike, this is no news to me as I work with the younger generation in trying to teach them the analytical skills needed to sort and sift through information. Unfortunately, society (including education policy makers, business leaders, and the general public) feel that just by showing the attributes, students will be able to magically analyze information.
At some point in the educational process, there needs to be a concerted effort to “teach” analysis because it is not a natural process for most people. At this point, in the US, Science education is the only subject where this is addressed, and they do a poor job of connecting the importance of this skill to other areas of life (such as evaluating data from the internet).
I do take exception to one area of your discussion, however. Rand Spiro and his colleagues have done a lot on the use of google search techniques and how searchers learn by going through the search process. The studies you cite look at whether workers found the information they were looking for (which may or may not have been relevant for the situation) rather than whether they found information that would be useful. For example, when I was looking for information for my class “computer supported writing across the curriculum”, I was looking specifically for readings on writing across the curriculum. In fact, I found very little usable information as readings. However, my search directed me into areas of the topic I would not have thought about (digital literacy, new ways of reading, the impact of hypertext on reading).
As Spiro recommends, we should be focusing students’ attention to capturing the learning that might come out of the search itself. This should also be something knowledge managers should try to capture. This brings me back to my days as a market researcher where I did not get the quota of telephone calls per day (like searches for google) but overall, I had a much better completion rate as I gained an understanding of the project as a whole and those I was interviewing…taking more time to create a relationship with them (understanding the topic through the search process).
September 15th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Interesting insights on your post, and interesting comments, too.
This matches my observations even working with students studying technology, and even some technology teachers who are focused only on the software they teach.
Here’s a link to some very basic search information I set up for a presentation to teachers - http://webbasics.pbwiki.com/Searching
BTW, English/Communications teachers often try to include critical thinking as part of their courses.
September 15th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Like the others, I don’t think any of the results are that surprising. I still think today’s youth are masters of technology. They are much more likely to try out new programs, register for accounts on social networking websites, create and share content, etc. than my parent’s generation. OK, I don’t know that those activities make them masters or just more willing to try things. To anyone who hasn’t posted a video on YouTube, that may seem like a great accomplishment.
What caught me was the quote that said, “respondents perform about 12 searches per day and, statistically, 4.7 of those searches do not obtain the desired results.” What exactly is considered a single search? Is it the single entry of a search term into google or does it include the iterations until the desired results are found.
When it states that, “The reported amount of time lost on each search that does not deliver the desired result equates to 12 minutes per day – or 46 hours annually.” Does it take into account that if I didn’t have access to the Internet and had to drive to the lirbary, I would have spent more than 12 minutes finding the desired information so I still saved time over the older techniques?
September 16th, 2008 at 7:10 am
@Mike W–I definitely agree that work literacy for advancement should be a goal/requirement for organizations and knowledge workers. I tend to think that this lack of encouragement comes, in part, from a disturbing stat I heard a few years ago at a conference about how companies are not investing in developing their workers until they’ve been around for at least 3 years. Even then, the learning is focused on company-specific skills. Given the shorter tenures in many companies, this is worrisome and indicates that people are going to have to take it upon themselves to become more skilled.
@Ken, I think you make a good point that many teachers are not skilled in these areas, which is why I thought it was interesting that the report I cited seems to think that the answer lies in the classroom.
@Virginia–interesting point about using the search process as a learning opportunity. I’d love to see how we could do a better job of supporting that learning process for people as I’m not sure that everyone is using search as you’re describing.
@Joan–In my experience there’s a range of English/Communication teacher skills in teaching critical thinking about using technology. My daughters have had teachers who basically think that the Internet is not a place for quality research, so rather than teaching them how to find and think critically about sources, they forbid the use of the web altogether. Fortunately these teachers are disappearing, but I wonder how many kids make it through their classes before they get to someone who will show them how to use the web effectively.
@Mike B–You’re asking some good questions, to which I don’t have the answers. Overall, I think that we do have an issue with people not knowing how to conduct proper searches, at least based on my personal experience and discussions with others. People don’t know a lot of the different search operators or how to put them together to conduct a more focused search, so they end up getting back really broad results that take forever to wade through.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:54 am
Kia ora Michele!
You say you “thought it was interesting that the report (you) cited seems to think that the answer lies in the classroom”.
My response to that is to the contrary. Wasn’t it Einstein who said, “you can’t solve a problem using the same minds that created it in the first place.”
Ka kite