Help vs. Hinder: Technology and Our Students

I teach postsecondary courses in journalism and mass communication. At 26, I feel like I'm in a unique position where I'm able to relate more to my students now than perhaps in another decade or two. And yet, in spite of the generational comradery, I sometimes think I'm "further away" than even I realize.

I recently gave my students an assignment--a research-intensive task that required attribution to credible studies--only to have one of my students ask for basic catalog assistance because they "had never had to go to the library." Of course, I offered some help, but I simultaneously wondered, "How is this possible? How can a senior about to graduate with a college degree have never entered the on-campus library?"

To be fair, they probably had entered the library throughout their undergraduate tenure, at least through the online services available to students; in fact, to my knowledge, card catalogs don't exist anymore, or at least only in select locations (where they're usually on display for archival/nostalgic reasons!). I know our campus library doesn't have one. And as a graduate student, I have frequently used the online services and databases available to me to locate literature and other resources necessary to complete my assignments.

But, as I inquired further as to how this student could have avoided any physical contact with our library, they replied that most of their research came from Internet sources.

Such a reply made me wonder: Do we help our students understand how technology potentially helps but also hinders them?

I didn't continue my inquiry, but I wondered if this student had--at least until this point--made it through their collegiate career without comprehension of how technology used in that way--i.e., to collect sources for research projects--can contribute to their success but can also damage the quality of their work? Did this student know how to verify credibility in the Internet sources they used?

In a different storyline that produced similar questions, I had just described my interpretation of the journalistic writing process to students in my introductory news reporting course, and I discovered that when it came to proofreading their work, the students--if they did it at all--typically just read through their entire story once. And only once. Trying to check for everything: an effective lead (or start to the story), strong verbiage, proper attribution to their human and literary sources, correct grammar and comma usage, appropriate AP Style technique, and avoidance of redundancy, echo quotes, unnecessary opinions, and factual errors.

My mind can't focus on all of those aspects at once, and I've been practicing my journalism craft for several years! So how could an introductory student do it?

Well, as it pertains to spelling and grammar, that's apparently Microsoft Word's responsibility. And strong verbiage? That comes from the readability statistics that appear after Word checks the document for spelling and grammatical errors. (Students can view the percentage of passive sentences in their text.) In the end, my students didn't know how to effectively proofread their stories. Perhaps that results from an over-reliance on technology to do it for them?

Anecdotes aside, the point of this blog post is to stress the importance of the fundamentals with our students.

Yes, technology can and does and will continue to help us and our students in academic endeavors. But we cannot become so engrossed in teaching our students how to make technology useful to them that we overlook these basics. After all, we know that anybody can disseminate anything via the Internet. An educated person should be able, however, to sift through the inundation of information and find credible, reliable sources. Similarly, an editor or supervisor will more often than not check someone's written work before it goes public. But what about that one time when they don't?

I believe that with reiteration of the basics comes self-sufficiency when it involves technology.