Does the Internet foster shallow learning?

YES
David Rothenberg:
Use it to connect with people, not information

The easiest thing for a student to do with the Web is to abuse it. Type the subject of a paper into a search engine, and hundreds of apparent answers appear: lists of sources, paragraphs to cut and paste together in minutes into a semblance of a piece of original writing.

The Web makes research look so much easier than it is, because it instantly generates results without teaching students how to evaluate what it promises. You toss a query to the machine, and suddenly a lot of possible sources of information appear on your screen. Instead of books that you have to check out of the library, read carefully, understand, synthesize, and then tactfully excerpt, these sources are quips, blips, pictures and short summaries that may be downloaded. How simple!

The only problem is that a paper consisting of summaries of summaries is bound to be fragmented and superficial, and to demonstrate more of a random montage than an ability to sustain an argument through 10 to 15 double-spaced pages.

What happens to the many students (some things never change) who scramble to write a paper the night before it's due? The computer screen, the gateway to the world sitting right on their desks, promises instant access--but actually offers only a pale, two-dimensional version of a real library.

We need to teach students how to read, to take time with language and ideas, to work through arguments, to synthesize disparate sources to come up with original thought. We need to help students understand how to assess sources to determine their credibility, as well as to trust their own ideas more than snippets of thought that materialize on a screen. Gone are the pathways of logic and passion, the sense of the progress of an argument. Chance holds sway, and it more often misses than hits. Judgment must be taught, as well as the methods of exploration.

However, the Web can do much that is positive, and I'm insisting that my students use it for what it was first designed for, to connect with people, real people, with fluid, forming, developing and living ideas.

We can teach our students how to use the Web to make books and ideas have a life of their own. They are produced by people, and we can teach them to find those people, contact them, engage with the authors and the subjects. Challenge your students to come up with the best questions they can find, have them use the Web like a detective to find the e-mail addresses of the people they want to contact, and, let them try out their query: If their question is good enough, they may get a personal, considered answer of the kind that used to be very difficult and slow to obtain.

Technology may well have delivered an unprecedented kind of global village. But only good teaching and careful questioning can help students become the village shaman rather than the village fool.

NO
Steve Jones:
Educators need to question their assumptions

It was no small surprise to find in a recent study of college students' use of the Internet conducted for the Pew Internet and American Life Project that 81 percent of students said they communicate more with their professors face-to-face than via e-mail.

Could it be that today's college students eschew the Internet in favor of that oldest of media--conversation? If so, are the dire predictions that the Internet is the latest medium to encourage laziness, plagiarism, disrupt the classroom, decrease literacy and reduce attention span wrong?

Such dire predictions are wrong because they are based on erroneous assumptions concerning the primacy of face-to-face communication as a medium of interaction and of the value of work as an indicator of learning.

In my 1995 book CyberSociety, I asked, "Why should face-to-face communication serve as an ideal?" Perhaps it is because it seems to be the only medium of communication over which we, as educators, feel we have particularly strong control. In contrast to students' attention being given over to computers, films, books and television, in face-to-face settings we believe that by hearing and seeing us they will pay attention to what we have to tell them. They will, in essence, have learning forced upon them as a consequence (perhaps even a by-product) of working to pay attention. As a result, we too often end up communicating in one direction as we seek to maximize their attention by excluding (what we consider) distractions.

But our own concerns as educators likely tend to cause us to overreact to what we perceive as threats to the educational models we hold dear. Perhaps it is easy, not hard, for students to pay attention to multiple, simultaneous modes of communication. Perhaps face-to-face communication is important to students but not in ways we had believed. The Pew study found that 55 percent of college students say that e-mail is useful for arranging face-to-face interactions. What the Pew results tell us is that students want us to pay attention to them. Less than 2 percent of students said the Internet has had a negative impact on their educational experience. The vast majority reported that it has enhanced their interactions with professors and classmates.

The college students also reported using the Internet more than the library for research, another finding most every teacher would find unsurprising. But many of the students are using resources their school library has made available online. Teachers must take this opportunity to teach students search methods that will get them to the information they want and how to evaluate it. The ethics of using information (whether it is found online or not) must also be emphasized.

The foundation of education is built on the process of communication--dialogic communication. Unlike many other media that preceded it, the Internet is a malleable medium that can be used for more than one-way communication. Let us make the most of it.