savvy
People who find themselves befuddled by “the connected lives of today’s college students” often make a false assumption, which is that being connected is the same as being tech-savvy. Actually, it doesn’t take a great deal of savvy to text or take pictures with your cellphone, or to post those pictures to your Facebook page. And whatever savvy it does require doesn’t transfer to the varieties of technical knowledge that aid the academic enterprise. Very few of my students can conduct a good and well-focused search in one of the databases of academic journals; their Google searches even are lousy. A surprising number are unaware that Microsoft Word has an outlining mode that would help them in taking class notes or planning a paper; almost none know that there are dedicated outlining applications that do that job much better than Word does. (When I tell them that I don’t even have Word, or for that matter any Microsoft application, on my computer they look upon me with a mixture of terror, dread, and awe.) When I explain that there are online services like Bib Me that can find publication data and format it properly for them they don’t even believe me. And as for any awareness of the PIM tools and applications available, often for free, on the web: fuggeddaboudit.
Some years ago the WSJ ran a wonderful interview with the architect Frank Gehry that concluded with a story about Gehry’s helping a friend redesign her office space. Gehry commented, “I've always had the fantasy of having a little kiosk in the mall where I could do that. Where people would line up and you would charge them 25 bucks and you would look at their plans. . . . Small pleasures.” My version of that: I’d love to be the personal technology consultant for my students. Listen to their problems, ask them a few questions about their work habits, take them to the applications (web or desktop) that would help put their little mental houses in order. Small pleasures.
I’m interested. What do you charge by the hour?
— Noah Millman · Mar 11, 03:37 PM · #
Me too – I would be TOTALLY great at that job.
I would suggest ten RSS feeds for kids to follow that would alert them to announcements and reviews of new software apps, then show them how to install a new information management application every two weeks to try it out before the license expires.
For bibliographies, I’d have them keep BibDesk, Zotero, and bibme.com open ALL AT THE SAME TIME, and when it came time to write a paper, I’d explain that it’s not the writing that matters – it’s more important to organize their draft sections in Scrivener in a way that matches whatever system of notes they use in Tinderbox. Of course, with all those distractions, they’d want to try just using a full-screen text editor, or even plain text files.
If they have trouble getting around to actually writing anything, they could read lots of blog posts about personal productivity and the best ways to organize those plain text files. That always gets the creative juices flowing, at least until it’s time to refresh those RSS feeds and discover a new app to try out.
— Matt Frost · Mar 11, 03:42 PM · #
Noah: Let’s see, Gehry wanted to charge 25 bucks, so I need to calculate my expertise in relation to Gehry, also our relative incomes . . . I think maybe three cents?
Matt: couldn’t agree more. Someday I’ll show my my finely-honed system for organizing and managing all my various options for organization and management. I mean, it takes time to procrastinate the way I do. GTD, dude!
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 11, 03:53 PM · #
Noah, wait, I forgot to apply the inverse square law: I meant fifteen hundred bucks. Sorry.
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 11, 03:58 PM · #
Alan: at $1500/hr you need to have at least three diamonds attached to your name. Just saying.
— Noah Millman · Mar 11, 04:23 PM · #
Well, sure, for my basic service. But then I’m also going to be offering the dawn-to-dawn seven-diamond Executive Special. Details forthcoming on my new website.
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 11, 04:29 PM · #
I use bibliography management software (EndNote) but wasn’t aware of BibMe. Thanks for the pointer.
— Greg Sanders · Mar 11, 04:30 PM · #