Their K-12 teachers are telling them this. Rather than actually teach kids how to evaluate information, it's easier to just give a set of rules. The kids are given a "rubric," which is basically a glorified worksheet, with precise details on exactly what's required. The rubric has to be precise enough that there's no way for a student to dispute the grade that they receive.
The question is not which website is credible, but what you can get away with on a paper.
THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files.
My kids are in 9th and 11th grades, respectively. When they were in grade school, we still needed to have MS Word in the house, because some of the teachers would freeze if a file wasn't in .docx format. Their papers still have to follow formatting rules that include things like margins, for doucuments that will never be printed.
Today, Word is a thing of the past. The kids do everything in the cloud, and the teachers have mostly figured it out. The last remaining uses of MS Word will be in academia, for manuscripts, and in business, for documents that nobody ever reads.
The reason for these rules is not related to printing. These rules are in place to enable fair grading:
- fixed font styling and page margins allow proper comparison of paper lengths (e.g. a student might try to use a bigger font size or bigger margins to get around a "submit 3 pages of text on issue xxx")
- fixed line height requirements allow teachers to print out the submitted document and annotate it - the resulting prints and the correction marks are usually archived to make disputes easier
They used something called word count.
Similarly, I was in college when word processing was introduced, and I think that turning in lengthy and typographically perfect term papers probably boosted my GPA. Thanks to doing lots of programming, I could sling text like nobody's business.
Imagine your phone with all of the computing power of your current desktop or laptop, with all of the same software too. If you want to work at a desktop, you could have a wireless keyboard, mouse, display, and power. This is all possible today, but the phones aren't quite there, yet.
If you don't need specialised tools, I personally think a tablet is much nicer than a laptop. A phone is basically just a smaller tablet.
What I wish I could have is a phone that I can copy an arbitrary python script to, then execute it. No "Android Studio" or "Xcode" monstrosity to create and load software. Just my text editor and a shell.
You can already do this on Android no problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31564123/run-python-in-a...
The underlying problem with android, as touched on in the article, is that your hardware vendor is the administrator of your phone.
Security on Android relies in the idea that who ever built the OS signs it, and any changes to system libraries, with a secret key. That's a lot of control. Couple that with lack of root and its not your phone.
Termux is like saying... 'I wish I owned my flat so I could remodell it how I want " "it is possible to redecorated your rented flat if you only put plasterboard over the walls"
Will solve thier problem, doesn't fix the insidious loss of power over our computerised lives these platforms (Android, Web applications) lead to.
That's an interesting perspective. I've always thought of phones and tablets as being mostly collections of tools that are either specialized or focused on remote access. Almost everything that I do on my touchscreen devices relies on network access, to some degree or another.
And since Android 7 has a split screen feature I can have a YouTube video playing while I'm surfing the web. So multitasking isn't just a PC domain anymore.
I distinctly remember, somewhere around the 8th grade having this exact question and answer on a "How to use computers" quiz. There was also some information about how search engines can't be trusted either (you should use curated website directories!). So who is telling kids this? Their education system, and whoever decided the curriculum to mandate kids learn.
If only 10% of your students are having problems with that, it's a pretty good technological aptitude overall.
Similarly I can use git, despite it's best efforts to be inscrutable.
But really, I find that people have trouble running ssh-keygen and then finding the key and sending me the correct one (they'll often send the private key, or more likely they'll send me both "just use the one you need".)
Do note that on, at least, mobile Chrome, the Chrome "omnibox" is actually rendered as the Google search page's search box. Typing addresses "into Google" is how you get the browser to navigate to them. If that's the only browser you've ever used, it would be quite a surprise to find that on the school computers, the Google search box is just a search box, and there's another box up at the top of the browser window you have to use for URL entry instead.
I teach at a liberal arts college and in most of my classes I devote a day or two to researching and evaluating sources. I ask them "How can to determine if a web site is credible?" and in every class I get a significant number of students say "If it is a .org, .gov, or .edu" Who is telling these kids this?
This week I had one class take an online survey and gave them a bit.ly link. I just cut and pasted it from bit.ly into notepad to make the font large enough that they could read it on the screen. In a class of ~35 I had 3-4 that were having problems. They were putting the url into google. At least one was typing in the "http://" that I had just cut and pasted. Of course it was on his phone so he had to find the punctuation.
THen ther are the students who submit .gdoc or .pages files and when I tell them to export the files to .docx or .rtf they say they don't have word. First off, you can download MS Office for free from the university. Secondly, you can export from google docs and pages to word files.
Of course this is not the majority of students but it is easily 1 in 10.
So whenever I see something about "digital natives" I roll my eyes. Until I have a colleague freak out about having to use the online gradebook the university is now making us use instead of a paper one because that person doesn't know how to do it.