Here we go again. IHE reports:

Professors, librarians, and other college officials are increasingly coming to grips with the somewhat confounding reality that despite students’ affinity for IPods and their complete comfort with Google, many of them lack the technological literacy they need to navigate today’s information landscape. But recognizing the problem is not the same as knowing how to measure or fix it — tasks that many colleges are puzzling over.

As much as my critique is turning into a repeated trope, the call for testing is an old gesture - and trope - to make folks think education is “paying attention” and is concerned about the relationship between communicative technologies (old or new) and learning (to which we can add writing). Part of that gesture relies upon the idea of testing as an answer, and the other part of that gesture is the relationship that testing companies, like ETS, have with educational institutions. ETS is no stranger to the repeated trope. On its website, we hear the - by now - cliche response as to what technology is important:

To succeed in today’s information-driven academic environment, students need to know how to find, use, manage, evaluate and convey information efficiently and effectively.

Of course, that was true before the computer. Computers didn’t invent the need to understand information aggregation. Specific practices emphasize the point and foreground it more than previous ones. That we didn’t get it right the first time (topic sentence driven research practices, massive standardized testing) is forgotten. Instead, ETS, or the Cal State system, blame the students. Not themselves.

With all respect to Barbara O’Connor who IHE quotes:

“People are good at learning technologies, but they are not so good at applying them,� said Barbara O’Connor, a professor of communications at California State University at Sacramento. O’Connor has become a strong advocate for increasing technological literacy.

The very same should be said about the administrations rushing to the testing services, the testing services, and most faculty within a given institution (with some obvious exceptions). That said, isn’t the test itself a technology? Have we learned how to apply it? I’d argue no, we haven’t. Not, at least, as either an indicator of promise (SAT) or as an indicator of success (the exam). If anything, one could easily argue the test as failed technology. It appears to be a bigger failure than any Web 2.0 idea. And it has a much longer history of repeated failure.

Interestingly, in the rush to test some more, there is little mention as to what “affinity” in the above quote means for usage. In other words, how does one test and assess an affinity, and how does one recognize an affinity’s potential for a variety of tasks? How does education - in its curricula design - work with that affinity, or does it work against it? If, for instance, one has an “affinity” for cutting and pasting text in a Word document (the basic principle of word processing) and then is discouraged from the practice (which is a new media practice) in a given test or essay (fear of plagiarism), who is at fault? Test or student? Even as I write this post, I engage in cut and past practices: from IHE, from the ETS site, in the post itself as I rearrange text. Am I avant-garde for doing so? No. But I am using an internalized logic. You can’t test that.