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yendiOnce again, the folks at Beloit College have released their "Mindset List," showing all the things incoming college students don't know that should make us old folks gasp, laugh, or cry.
Once again, the list, stripped down to the interesting stuff, would only be about five items long, and while those things would all be worthwhile, it wouldn't be enough to get Beloit free publicity, so they pumped it up.
The first two items are both worthwhile. Mind you, Pew Internet figured out that teens don't use email six years ago, but it's something that does bear repeating (especially in academia, where email is so often king, or at least false king). And the cursive thing is both true and interesting (especially as someone who hated the years of cursive instruction I suffered through).
But then things get stupid. "Go West, Young College Grad? Um, wtf? Kids aren't even likely to be familiar with the actual phrase "“Go West, Young Man," but this one's not even on the charts. As I tweeted earlier, the Buffy fact was clearly written by someone with Wikipedia and no real familiarity with the show. Kids my daughter's age were too old to be into Miley Cyrus, so no way are college students fans (they're more likely to have been Britney Spears fans during her heyday). Woody Allen, too, isn't on their radar, and even if they know who he is, they likely have no clue who Soon-Yi is.
And Barney the Dinosaur couldn't have "supplanted" Barney Google and Barney Fife, as neither of those factors for my generation. Barney Rubble would have been a better choice here.
Of course, fact #74 is just plain wrong, as there is, technically, no longer a channel called "The Sci-Fi Channel." And even before the name change, it often "blasted off" with such fare as ECW Wrestling and Ghost Hunters.
What the list really is, of course, is a list of shit that happened roughly eighteen years ago (give or take a few). Ginsburg got appointed to the Supreme Court, Domino's got rid of their 30-minutes-or-its-free policy, Bud Selig was made de facto commissioner of baseball, Beavis and Butthead became popular, etc. Few of these facts affect teens today, and not too many of them affect us, either.
(And, of course, it should go without saying that this is a very US-centric list, something I find particularly interesting given that all US universities are seeing bigger pools of international students, and the original purpose of this list was to remind faculty not use dated cultural references. You'd think being aware of folks from other countries would be a factor here, too.)
There's nothing wrong with a list of interesting facts, per se (Irving Wallace and his family made some decent cash with nothing but such lists), but it's not a commentary on the next generation. Talk about how they're the first generation being heavily exposed to the idea that physics should be taught before biology, or the fact that they might already have been exposed to LMS software in high school, or that watching movies on their computers is second nature to them, or any of the zillion things that might actually affect how they're going to react to an instructor's pedagogical skills (or lack thereof), and I'll find the list a hell of a lot more interesting. For now, I can hit Wikipedia when I want to know what was going on in 1992, just like everybody else.
(And yes, this list gets forwarded a zillion times in higher ed, which is why it annoys me a lot more than it likely annoys folks who see the article one time in the local paper (or on the local paper's website) and move on.)
Once again, the list, stripped down to the interesting stuff, would only be about five items long, and while those things would all be worthwhile, it wouldn't be enough to get Beloit free publicity, so they pumped it up.
The first two items are both worthwhile. Mind you, Pew Internet figured out that teens don't use email six years ago, but it's something that does bear repeating (especially in academia, where email is so often king, or at least false king). And the cursive thing is both true and interesting (especially as someone who hated the years of cursive instruction I suffered through).
But then things get stupid. "Go West, Young College Grad? Um, wtf? Kids aren't even likely to be familiar with the actual phrase "“Go West, Young Man," but this one's not even on the charts. As I tweeted earlier, the Buffy fact was clearly written by someone with Wikipedia and no real familiarity with the show. Kids my daughter's age were too old to be into Miley Cyrus, so no way are college students fans (they're more likely to have been Britney Spears fans during her heyday). Woody Allen, too, isn't on their radar, and even if they know who he is, they likely have no clue who Soon-Yi is.
And Barney the Dinosaur couldn't have "supplanted" Barney Google and Barney Fife, as neither of those factors for my generation. Barney Rubble would have been a better choice here.
Of course, fact #74 is just plain wrong, as there is, technically, no longer a channel called "The Sci-Fi Channel." And even before the name change, it often "blasted off" with such fare as ECW Wrestling and Ghost Hunters.
What the list really is, of course, is a list of shit that happened roughly eighteen years ago (give or take a few). Ginsburg got appointed to the Supreme Court, Domino's got rid of their 30-minutes-or-its-free policy, Bud Selig was made de facto commissioner of baseball, Beavis and Butthead became popular, etc. Few of these facts affect teens today, and not too many of them affect us, either.
(And, of course, it should go without saying that this is a very US-centric list, something I find particularly interesting given that all US universities are seeing bigger pools of international students, and the original purpose of this list was to remind faculty not use dated cultural references. You'd think being aware of folks from other countries would be a factor here, too.)
There's nothing wrong with a list of interesting facts, per se (Irving Wallace and his family made some decent cash with nothing but such lists), but it's not a commentary on the next generation. Talk about how they're the first generation being heavily exposed to the idea that physics should be taught before biology, or the fact that they might already have been exposed to LMS software in high school, or that watching movies on their computers is second nature to them, or any of the zillion things that might actually affect how they're going to react to an instructor's pedagogical skills (or lack thereof), and I'll find the list a hell of a lot more interesting. For now, I can hit Wikipedia when I want to know what was going on in 1992, just like everybody else.
(And yes, this list gets forwarded a zillion times in higher ed, which is why it annoys me a lot more than it likely annoys folks who see the article one time in the local paper (or on the local paper's website) and move on.)