Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information, a professor of media studies will claim this week.
In her inaugural lecture at the University of Brighton, Tara Brabazon will urge teachers at all levels of the education system to equip students with the skills they need to interpret and sift through information gleaned from the internet.
She believes that easy access to information has dulled students’ sense of curiosity and is stifling debate. She claims that many undergraduates arrive at university unable to discriminate between anecdotal and unsubstantiated material posted on the internet.
“I call this type of education ‘the University of Google’.
“Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.
“Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content,” she said.
Alexandra Frean, Education Editor
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3182091.ece
Saturday, January 19, 2008
White bread for young minds, says university professor
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2 comments:
I completely agree with you because today many students think that by information on the internet is entirely reliable but it is not because the information is not cited from scholarly work. The unpleasant thing about the Internet is that anyone can post invalid information and there is no method to determine out which information is true of false without a reference to a factual book. This generation is becoming to addicted to the world of technology and they are dependent on it. Books are where information should be learned and used from.
To some extent I agree with Anita. The only way to get reliable information is from books. As our parents have surely told us, they never had computers in their day and they were fine without it. Now in the internet age, a lot of things are done with technology and can be very opinionated and therefore not that reliable. In a philosophical point of view, textbooks will not be reliable either, no one knows the absolute truth, who can prove that they are right? Once one is proved, the next, and the next, and the next must be proved. Even primary documents might not even be reliable even though they are directly from a time period. Documents with bias are not reliable either. What do you think?
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