Tuesday, February 20, 2007

New Test Finds Student's Cyber Aptitude Wanting

I found this in the Sunday Tribune.
Just 52 percent of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site and only 65 percent assessed the site's authoritativeness.
When asked to use a search engine to look for information on the Internet, only 40 percent entered multiple search terms to narrow the results.

Heyboer, Kelly. "New Test Finds Students' Cyber Aptitude Wanting." Chicago Tribune 18 Feb. 2007, sec. 1: 6.

I want to take this test and find out what my digital (The word cyber is so 90's.) aptitude is. I'd like to think I've got a step up on most people when it comes to digital literacy but the sad truth is that I find myself all too often turning to Wikipedia and Google (only) for a quick informational fix. I've asked several kids about what they would do if they had to look up Teddy Roosevelt and didn't know anything about him. They all said Wikipedia. Are some kids digitally illiterate or is it more about laziness? It's a lot easier to just jump to Google or Wikipedia than to query several different search engines or to browse several different websites.

We definitely need to educate our students on how to find valid information, but how will we fight digital laziness?

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