Seriously, how hard is it to work the Internet? I consider myself pretty low on the All-Things-Technological scale (the irony of which does not escape me since I am teaching a class on technology and identity). HOWEVER, I do consider myself pretty smart and able to, by mere tooling around, figure out a lot of super easy things. Its like they come across super-easy aspects of technology and all the sudden their advance little brains are all "Error... Error. Does not compute. Does not compute" before their heads start spinning around and smoking and then combust. Or at least that's how I imagine it.

But seriously, this stuff is so easy that even I can do it. Stuff like inserting my name and page number in the upper right hand corner of a Word document per the conventions of MLA formatting. Or, how to (based on the little handy dandy button that just happens to be labeled so) upload attachments to WebCT. Or turn on the "Track Changes" button in a Word Document. I taught myself basic HTML for gods sakes!

My Little Darlings II (aka my WP121 Research Writing students) can't seem to figure this sh*t. For kids who can program an iPod and make movies digitally using their cell phones and some fancy smancy program, they sure as hell are really technologically stupid sometimes. I have this new working theory that the easier the technology is, the more stupid they are about it.

Disclaimer: I think my Little Darlings II are quite brilliant actually. They made some really good observations about William Gibson's Neuromancer in their papers--some of which I didn't even think about myself. So they're smart...

Back to the point. About a bazillion of them either called me or emailed me in a tizzy at 9:30 p.m. last night (their paper was due on WebCT by 10 p.m.) because they couldn't figure out how to do this, that, or the other thing. It literally gets to a point sometimes where I want to be like "Are you playin' me? Are you trying to work the system cause you're too lazy to figure it out yourself?" Cause that's the only logical excuse I can come up with as to why they can't figure out how to insert the page numbers in the header.

Seriously...