Monday, October 1, 2007

Our students take technology for granted. Do we?

The recent report from the Educause Center for Applied Research, The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007 has some interesting findings for higher ed, if not all that surprising. I say not surprising, but for boomer administrators, of which my school has a great many, the findings underline the need to keep up the chase after at least technology familiarity. It's an undertaking that's easy to push aside in our busy-ness. But we can't afford to.

I know, it's not always easy. But consider this, according to the report:
These students, many of whom have never known a world without personal access to information technologies, often take them for granted and integrate them seamlessly into their everyday lives.
What does that mean, integrate ... into their everyday lives? Here's a great example: I overheard a colleague recently telling another that she still needed to keep paper files of invoices, even though these are scanned into a database by the finance department. "When you can show that you can quickly and easily locate an invoice and provide a copy, then maybe we can consider not having hard copies on file."

Are you kidding me? It's easier, faster and more reliable to search a database than locate an invoice in a paper file. Yet we continue to keep the hard copies because it's what we're comfortable with. I'm betting anybody under 35 would search a database without a second thought. And our students? That a document - or almost any other piece of needed information - is online somewhere is a practically a given. Hard copy? What would you want that for?

That kind of mindset change is what I'm talking about. As long as we boomers continue to print things out to read them (except, maybe, longer documents), resist the power of online sorting and storage, make edits on hard copy instead of using Word's track changes (or better yet, an online document writing and sharing system), wait for an email when an IM would have taken care of the problem already, we can't begin to comprehend the world our students live in, much less communicate effectively with them.

Granted, this is only a minor implication gleaned from this report. The bigger picture looks at technology and its integration into learning. But grasping the minor points and making even the smallest mindset change is essential if we want to effectively reach our prospects where they live.