Students today seem to have it made. 

Really, at no other time have laypeople had access to the information we do.  We all walk around with gigabyte thumbdrives in our pockets, toting laptop computers while we listen to a podcast on our iPod, or yack it up on our bluetooth enabled wireless headset. 

You would think there was nothing for us to worry about regarding school.  I mean, how could there be...all we need to do to get information is ASK, and the internet provides.  Need to contact somone?  411 for anyone! 

Unfortuantely, many instructors see only the benefits of the techno-rich envioronment we are living in.  They do not always see the price we pay for it.  I don't mean the dollar amount (though that is significant) but the cost to us as people:

We may be networked to the entire world from wherever we may happen to be, but how do we combat that information overload.  With SO MUCH available we must be good judges of when information is likely to be valid, and when it is garbage.  We are forced to learn how to process this plethora of data efficiently.  Getting 2 million hits on a google search we have to write about is not particularly a good thing.  We have to sort the chaff from the gold.  In prior generations, undergraduate research was primarily a challenge in finding the information, if it is even possible to do so.  Now, there is likely  glut of information, but we must determine what is worth using...a project which involves MORE work and reading than it took to examine the 1 or 2 sources available to earlier students.

Our social skills often take a beating too.  We spend so much time interacting with electronic devices that our social graces become rusty.  You don't have to say please or thank you to your ipod.  Google does not make you convince it to give you the information you are asking for.  People require differernt handling than electronics, and I fear a genereation is coming that won't know that.  An instructor who comes from a pre-technorevolution time will have very little patience for the terse communication a techno-literate student may give them.  Not a good situation for the student who is being evaluated. 

We are becoming more and more physically isolated even as we are more electronically connected.  Imagine a 'group project' where the authors meet in person twice.  Believe me it is happening.  Probably has happened to you.  Now compare that to the 'good old days' when groups of students met regularly at the campus library to collaborate and help each other.  Our refined degree of convenience has cost us access to our fellow students as resources, and as simple human contacts.

How often are you alone in a room, just you and the glow of a computer screen?  Your 'human' contact and iPod or MP3 player?

Do we really have it made?