I just had a 17 year-old student ask me what “Web surfing” is. He’s really smart, more than 700 on his verbal SAT. He uses computers as regularly as any teenager, which is to say, constantly. He was reading our school’s computer use policy, which does not allow Web surfing during school hours. The policy was written five years ago when we moved to a new building and installed a wireless Internet router. Back then, issues of concern included surfing, downloading music, incessant email-checking, and occasional outbreaks of instant messaging. A few students had laptops, but most weren’t wireless.
We’re revisiting the policy. Now, most students have wireless laptops. They spend their time on Facebook or other social networking sites, playing multi-user games online, and make each other laugh playing YouTube videos. That’s about it. Email is boring and for stuff like homework. Everyone texts, no one IMs. We don’t allow iPods or cell phones in school, so texting and music downloading are less of a challenge. And, apparently, in the age when you can Google anything, web surfing is unknown.
The question occurred in the context of a student-teacher forum to discuss revising our policy, and I have to give the students credit. We hammered them hard with Weizenbaum quotations about how computers are a solution in search of a problem (especially in education), about how if you spend your life, "Wall-E" style, in front of a screen, earbuds firmly in place, you and your genius will not mature. They bought all of it. They use computers more than we older folks do, but they're less enamored of them. We say that computers are tools to remind ourselves that this is true; students know it and so they don't even have to say it.
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