The Feral User

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The Feral User

10/15/2003

By Terry Calhoun

When did we become responsible for “civilizing” feral users, and why d'esn’t anyone realize the huge responsibility that has been thrust on higher education IT staff?

If you’ve read Lord of the Flies or Tarzan, or ever heard about the Wolf Boy in anthropology class you’re familiar with the spectrum of mythology regarding what young people without adults are capable of getting up to. Tarzan, of course, was remarkably civilized for having been raised by nonhuman animals but those kids in Lord of the Flies were scary.

We’ve almost got a Lord of the Flies situation with our freshman class and its cyberculture. They’ve grown up with access to IT and the Internet and have acculturated in a shadowy, underground cyberworld that is not under adult supervision. And most of them have been exposed to little or no “civilizing” processes with regard to their computer usage – until they come to campus.

Beloit College published the annual Beloit College Mindset List (http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/releases/ mindset_2007.html). It makes headlines each fall with items intended to educate college staff about incoming freshmen. Items like: “Bert & Ernie are old enough to be their parents”; “Computers have always fit in their backpacks”; “They have always had a PIN number”; and “There have never been dress codes in restaurants.”

One item I am not sure that I agree with is ““Ctrl + Alt + Del” is as basic as ‘ABC.’” Some of them know that, but others just hit the off button and hold it down until everything stops. And that’s symptomatic of a really huge societal problem. They don’t care about hitting the off button, because if the computer breaks their parents will fix it for them – they don’t see the costs of that. Ditto with the situation on campus.

As recent news items have made clear, our incoming students have an expectation of state-of-the-art connectivity and access. Many of them have spent years by now going home after school and spending hours online doing e-mail, chat, surfing, and also talking with friends on cell phones, simultaneously.

They’ve lived a chunk of their lives inside their computers, but who have they been learning social behavioral norms from? Basically, no one but their peers. So we’ve got something that sometimes looks like a Lord of the Flies situation.

Parents aren’t teaching them, d’oh! Sure, a handful of conscientious parents spend time showing kids computer basics – more likely they go to their kids when they get a new toy and ask the kids to learn how to use it and show them. Few parents spend any time at all monitoring their teenagers’ online behaviors and connections and those who do are largely frustrated and lack a real grasp of what g'es on. In my own household, we had a rule that computers capable of going online had to be in a room adjacent to and within sight of where the parents spend their time, and our teenagers stuck to that. That let me occasionally get a glimpse into the teenager cyberworld, but only a glimpse . . . and what I saw was often scary.

How about their teachers in middle school and high school? What a joke! The K-12 world is pathetically hopeless about IT, and especially about student usage of the Internet. There is a complete lack of funding, teacher training, or focus. Even those school systems which are giving students laptops – every 6th grader in Michigan is getting a laptop, for example – don’t really know what to do with them. Teachers and K-12 administrators almost universally find it impossible to deal with because it is uncontrollable, and K-12 is all about control.