I am teaching a first year communications course for engineers. Most of the students seem to be making some real progress. As always, a few need very little guidance from me and others won’t listen to what I say no matter what.

I keep hearing about how tech-savvy today’s students are, and I have to say, I’m REALLY not seeing it. Many, if not MOST of the kids in my classes really don’t know very much about modern technology, and they FOR SURE don’t understand how most of it works. I am accustomed to working with Computer Science students who are, of course, at the extreme end of the geek-pool when it comes to tech so perhaps I’ve been lulled into a false sense of complacency.

As I am not formally trained in Communication, I spent some time looking around to see what ‘the world out there’ thought technical writing (TC) was about. I was surprised at what I found. A good friend of mine who teaches in a Technical Communication faculty said that for many, “technical communication” means “writing manuals”. I’ve been doing technical communication most of my adult life and only a small part of what I do involves manuals or documentation.

When I looked at books used as texts in TC courses I found that they typically include some grammar and writing style, but they are mainly concerned with writing reports and formal communication. They are almost exclusively concerned with print media. It occurred to me that that leaves out a large and growing aspect of professional and technical communication and work: more and more stuff is being done online. The landscape has changed dramatically in the last ten years and it looks as though the rate of change is not likely to slow any time soon. This means that the environments that my students will be working in will likely involve a lot of technology.

Even though my doctorate was not ‘on-line’, I did MOST of my research online, because:

1. The researchers and other community members in my area are spread all over the world, and
2. There was no-one at my university, or even in my province who knew much of anything about my area.

As a result when it came to the actual stuff of my doctoral work I was quite on my own. I had local help for the process, but not for the content. I learned a lot about ‘modern’ methods of communication doing my thesis.

Perhaps my mistake is in thinking that today’s so-called Digital Natives are as well versed in the uses and potentials of 21-st century technology as I am. Marc Prensky, who coined the term, “Digital Natives” did so some years ago and the promise that these kids held at the time seemed great. There are many kids who have a good sense of the technology, its limitations and potentials, to be sure, but I am discovering that these kids seem to be in the minority and that’s a real problem.

A large chunk of the engineer wanna-bes in the classes I teach know very little about communication – and the more I work on this the more I realize that communication is a key skill.

So here’s a question:

WHAT DID THESE PEOPLE ACTUALLY LEARN IN HIGH SCHOOL?

English? Nope.
History? Nope.
Recent History (including pop culture)? NOPE.
Geography? Still Nope. (SO, I’m thinking if they took Social at all, they weren’t paying attention).
Computer literacy? HARDLY.
Math? Maybe, but they can’t seem to calculate their own grades.
Problem solving? ONLY if you tell them all the steps for the solution.
Assessing Information? REALLY not.

Help me out here folks. What do kids actually learn in High School these days?

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