When it comes to technology, students are the ones pioneering the use of technology, with a few innovators and professors leading the way. The educators are harder ones to convince of the uses of the web and internet when it comes to teaching and student use, preferring to learn and teach as they had been taught, using books and papers. Most caution against the internet, as it is a rather new and unforgiving territory, one that they are unprepared for and slow to adapt to.
Their reasons to hesitate with new methods of information-sharing are warranted. What someone said in highschool could come back and haunt them in their thirties, thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter. When teachers do bring up the internet, the majority consists of some form of “Don’t use Wikipedia”, “don’t put up anything personal online”, and “Websites are not proper sources, you can’t site them (because they are always changing)”. If they do teach about the internet, it is used as another way of using pen and paper, like ebooks and online academic journals. This has slowly begun to change the way classes will be taught, with increasing use and reliance on technology.
As everyone is adapting to the ever-increasing presence of technology in our lives, so have the attitudes towards the internet and computers changed, as well as the teaching methods used. Papers, books, and articles are not the only means of presenting research and furthering knowledge among scholars. So much information is right at people’s fingertips. Where the problem was once a lack of information, now there is an overabundance of information to sort and shift through, as relevance and time allows.
Websites and blogs are becoming more common and acceptable means of gathering and sharing information, but to what level are they the same? In a perfect world, all information would be held equal, but how can people replicate and use what they do not understand?
With an increasing part of people’s lives being lived on the internet, new ways of navigating and interacting with the world and each other are being created. People can interact with others in ways they never could before the internet, and the new dangers that have been created as well.
Now classes can be taught online, which is a very big break from the more traditional methods of teaching, functioning as a mix of homeschooling, tutoring, and traditional teaching depending on the class, the teacher, the subject, and the requirements.
Professors are creating new guidelines to adapt to the expanding field, allowing for online projects to be held at the same level as a research paper, even if it has different uses and requirements when dealing with information.
One reply on “Students and the Internet Frontier”
Yes, there are dangers associated with the internet, but educators could teach students ways to navigate those dangers like educators teach students to navigate hazards in the physical world. There could be a specialized class like D.A.R.E. and the stranger danger campaign to teach students about the dangers of the internet. Educators could discuss catphishing, computer viruses, and the potential for false information.