"Some of this is related to the students' location in the rust belt, rather than within BosWash or San Di-Ang-Jos-Fran or SeatPort, but a great deal of it seems to be that their schools, parents and peers tend not to provide them mental maps or images of the different ways the intertubes are and can be used. I figured out, finally this Fall, that I not only have to teach my students what to do I have to teach them how to think about what it is that I am showing them to do..."
Well, I think one reason the difficulty is there is because the introduction of the internet space is the most revolutionary change to have happened in human communication since the printing press. Writing an email is different from writing a letter. Writing to a blog is not the same as keeping a journal.The experience of reading something on a computer screen is different from reading it in a newspaper or a book....ad infinitum.
The medium of the internet redefines the private/public distinction, redefines the meaning of memory and archive, redefines the meaning of collaboration in a public space, and so on.
I have lived and continue to live these differences, having planned to teach Renaissance lit and philosophy of language ....and having wound up writing programming books for the last thirty years.
Also the effect of the internet on our notion of communication, on our sense of identity, on our participation in public life, and on our consciousness is not a static thing, but an evolving and changing force that affects the subject, which affects the process, which comes back to redefine the subject. It took hundreds of years for the paradigms engendered by the printing press to subsume our ideation about communication, knowledge, intelligence, consciousness. (See Ong's work.) Something similiar is happening with the computer/internet mediium. It would be a real education for your students for you to explore some of these issues with them rather than assuming or feeling frustrated that they don't "already know."
Joanna