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The Feral User
10/15/2003
It’s no wonder that we find students with a completely different morality with regard to P-to-P file sharing and other related intellectual property issues. And that we have students who think nothing of writing worms or viruses that will cause (mostly) adults problems. I could tell you stories about how they harass, stalk, and emotionally attack each other using IT that would curl your hair, but that’s for another article.
So, we get these kids and we – for reasons that have to do with education, research, and the desire to attract the students to our campuses in the first place – give them an even better cyber playground than they had before. And, of course, after being on vacation all summer with even less supervision, doing all sorts of unsafe computing, they come back and we have to create the IT equivalent of a cyber health strike force to get them healthy again. We’re just at the point where a handful of schools have a few hours, maybe, of required sit-in-lecture indoctrination about not stealing music files and not clicking on unknown attachments in e-mail. The good news is that we may have reached some sort of critical threshold this academic year where the student body is as a whole cognizant that safe computing is important because it affects their ability to be connected and do the things they’ve become used to doing.
Let’s take advantage of that. We were forced into a huge, focused outreach and we spent a lot of money we really didn’t have. But we’re going to save a lot more money if we spend more on educating these students about cyber responsibility. And it may even be that we have a society-wide responsibility to do so.
The fact is that graduating college students comfortable with information technology tools and their safe use, is as important for the future of modern civilization as graduating primary school students who can read well. In either case it’s “literacy,” and important!
But no one’s doing it. Their parents didn’t. Their schools didn’t. The formal curriculum at our colleges and universities won’t.
Yet we need them to learn about how to be responsible participants in cyberspace – and so do the companies and organizations that will be employing them when they are graduates of our institutions. But we aren’t requiring classes in computer user behavior and we’re not likely to. Our institutions, despite the swerve in recent years away from liberal education, have not shown an inclination to spend a lot of time teaching practical things like personal hygiene or its cyber-equivalent.
Recent students have shown that our institutional leaders, even in difficult financial times, think investments in IT are important. Recent columns in this series have made the point that we need to take more responsibility for things like providing our students with antiviral software.
Maybe we need to do even more, we being IT staff. Maybe we need to consciously accept responsibility for taking in our freshman class of feral users each year and within four years turn them into responsible cybercitizens.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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