Society & Culture - Posted by Jim Barlow-Oregon on Monday, April 12, 2010 15:25 - 4 Comments 
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(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5) Loading ...Digital sink or swim for college undergrads
Computer technology and Internet access are keys to success in college, but students often leave high school with very little skill, says Joanna Goode. “Once you walk onto campus, you can’t enroll in classes, you can’t get financial aid, you can’t get onto Blackboard, you can’t answer e-mails. If you have no technology knowledge, you will not even survive the first week at most university campuses.”
U. OREGON (US)—Students entering college either have it or they don’t—and which side of the digital divide they fall on may shape what career path they take.
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Institutions are “perpetuating rather than resisting inequalities associated with the digital divide,” says Joanna Goode, professor of education studies at the University of Oregon and author of a new study published online in the journal New Media and Society.
“I found that high-school opportunities around technology really shape students’ abilities to engage fully in university academic life,” Goode says.
“If students don’t have experiences in high school, they show up for college ill-prepared to have a variety of choices about which directions to go in their scholarship.
“Strong preparation, either at home or in high school, can really launch students into feeling successful in college. Insufficient preparation really gives students a sense of not belonging and a deficit in their own perspectives as academic beings.”
The research looked at computer technology knowledge of 500 undergraduate students and how skills they brought from high school impacted their early college coursework.
The study, conducted in California with a comprehensive survey and selected follow-up interviews with three students with different technological experiences, captured a snapshot of the digital divide in 2004. While the definition of digital divide may need revision, Goode says, the problems identified in the study likely have gotten worse and need to be addressed.
Wikipedia defines the digital divide as “the gap between people with effective access to digital and information technology and those with very limited or no access at all.”
Goode says that definition might well be more about how people’s identities—tied to their understanding and use of computers and software—create both academic opportunities and obstacles.
“While the knowledge divide is still important, at a fundamental level, it is now more a case of what is the context of using technology, and why does it matter for each individual?”
Computer technology and Internet access are keys to success in college, but students often leave high school with skills ranging from very little to fully saturated, Goode says. Very few of the students had received formal training geared for academic success in high school.
In her study, Goode chose three students with varying technology skills for in-depth interviews who helped her explore what they knew about technology when entering college, and whether their knowledge level was a barrier or a gatekeeper to certain majors.
The picture that emerged from all the data, Goode says, is that in high school “some kids are being trained for using technology for academic purposes or they may be taught for low-level vocational uses that makes them good workers but not necessarily good scholars.
“Even though there is no prerequisite for knowing about technology to get to the university level—there are requirements for math, science and other things—there is no technology prerequisite,” she says.
“But once you walk onto campus, you can’t enroll in classes, you can’t get financial aid, you can’t get onto Blackboard (a widely used electronic education software suite), you can’t answer e-mails. If you have no technology knowledge, you will not even survive the first week at most university campuses.”
Many students, Goode says, begin college unprepared technologically but have no ready access for remedial workshops or help during orientation. “They are left on their own. If they don’t have that knowledge it’s one more sense of ‘I don’t’ belong, I’m not prepared. I’m out of here.’”
Such a feeling, she adds, is especially hard on first-generation students who have little technology exposure at home or in high school.
“The high schools aren’t telling them, the college counselors aren’t telling them, and it’s not until they get to campus that it is a reality. There’s no time to go back and catch up on that knowledge.”
University of Oregon news: http://uonews.uoregon.edu/
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4 Comments
Jill
fang
On the face of it, the results of the study is ridiculous. Freshmen to colleges may have big problems adapting to and picking up the technological skills if they’re, perhaps, a generation older, but not when they’re barely 20. basic skills like blackboard and emailing are easy to pick up at least for the willing, even when one does not own a personal laptop, as there are many computers on campus in the library.
Jill
My guess is that you are on on the other side of the digital divide. If you don’t own a computer or even if you are just on dial-up or with no internet at all, there are skills that you don’t practice often – you have no opportunity except at friends’ houses (do they have access?) or at school no matter your age. And yes, you are right – the skills can be picked up.
However, the lag while you are learning but still yet expected to produce in college or university can make for dificulties. Everything becomes twice as hard because you have to learn the program(s)/research skills as well as do the work. People who are comfortable with computers don’t even see the difficulty involved. Two similes come to mind. First, you’re in university and instead of taking 5/6 courses – you are expected to do 7 (that’s the learning the technology bit) but your instructor never shows up. You have to write the labs or essays and the exams anyway. Fair? Or to look at it another way, it can be sort of like – well … telling a person who doesn’t drive, to get in a car and drive 100 kms while doing a job interview over their bluetooth. Let’s say they may know the theory of how; they may even have practiced a few times. They might be able to accomplish it – but how well are they going to do in the interview?
Guilty Sky
There’s too many people going to college, anyways. As a result, even the worst jobs are looking for people with degrees. I think the technology divide is a good thing because those who don’t bother to learn about computers aren’t attending/finishing college, delaying the day when we have fast food courses at tech schools and entry-level white collar jobs demand a decade of higher educatino.
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I agree with this. I work in a downtown high school with a large immigrant population and this can be a problem.
It can be overcome however. I went back to school in my forties at Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario. This college had a required technology/software familiarity course in order to make sure that all students were at a minimum level of competence. It was a pass/fail course with specific components and tests of each component, done on your own (custom courseware) but with help labs offered every week. As far as I’m aware it was required for every program and designed specifically for each. The tests were offered online and could be taken at any time. Passing was required for entering second semestre. This put all students on a more level playing field.
A library/researching course might be offered in the same way. But at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the University Library is working toward the goal of offering researching workshops for every faculty, offered by the subject librarians and designed specific to each. These introduce how to research, plagerism and how find various types of information that are helpful for that course, online or in print, whether it be an introduction to Statistics Canada, how to find a 18th century newspaper or how to search SciFinder Scholar (a chemistry database) etc.