ELI is the Educause Learning Initiative, and Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education through the use of information technology. So when ELI publishes the results of a survey about Key Issues in Teaching and Learning, you know the items identified will all be technology-related. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting list, and their historical list on which you can see the movement of items across the years in terms of priority by surveyees, is even more interesting.
My own major frustration continues to be in the extremely uneven and very basic misunderstandings, lack of knowledge and lack of ability that my students when it comes to using computers. They consider themselves exceptionally proficient, but are quickly out of their depth when faced with a different machine, a different network, a different application or operating system. And their troubleshooting skills are generally very poor. I don’t think that fits on this list, but I sure wish someone would begin to consider the critical importance of RELIABLY being able to use a computer in this day and age!
