It’s a curious stage of my FYC classroom activity when students’ questions are not about the writing but about what they don’t understand about their computer interaction. Just today I heard these issues: “I am not MS Word literate, It took me four hours to write this last paper,” (one annotated bibliography listing), “I can’t figure out the (Purdue) OWL website,” “It asks me to sign in to the library from home, I can’t get on,” “I didn’t read your email, I was in class(said at 130pm about an 8am email), “I don’t use the school email and I can’t figure out how to transfer it,” “(at home) my school account won’t let me sign on,” “I don’t know how to get my bibliography to look like the MLA format,” “I don’t know how to change the font,” “If I can look up an author online, is it a good source?” and more that I can’t remember right now. This is on top of last week’s 90 minute exercise to go into a library to do a preliminary search on a topic of their choice, after 3 different demonstrations in the search function of our library’s collection of books, each demo done online in my classroom projected on the big screen. Yet, half merely walked up to the librarian and asked him/her to show them how to use the computer and search a topic. Was it a reticence to explore or did the new info not register or was it merely laziness? Or maybe it was an aversion or fear of the computer. Or something else? These folks all have computers at home, I think, so it can't be a computer-aversion. They usually tell me if they don’t have one and I haven't heard that so far. But something stopped them from melding easily with that new task. I get that maybe it is like looking up a word you don’t know how to spell, like you need to know how to spell it to look it up – search functions on computers often yield no help (and no results) unless you know exactly what question to ask. Is it in the politics of the computer? I know it is in the algorithm. That’s a starting place to investigate.
My personal opinion is that we've become accustomed to everything moving at lightning speed (and these kids grew up with it) that when something takes time and effort but is still largely computer-based (like research) students get overwhelmed and freeze. Deer in headlights. Some would say "Well aren't you just meaning they're lazy?" but no, I don't really mean that; spending 4 hours fighting with Word to get the paper done is not laziness. Everything else happens for them with a click of the mouse; why not this too?
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