The Internet didn’t make people stupid; they were already stupid. The Internet just brings it out more.
I’ve always been partial to this article: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
It lays the claim that, as has happened throughout humanity with every great transformation of how we access information (writing, the printing press, the internet) the way we view intelligence shifts with the new innovation.
With writing,
With the printing press,
Which leads us to now and the complaints of Ron Jeremy. What’s funny is that this article is something I read over a year ago and, although I forgot most of the content, I remembered the general thesis and how to access it online - which proves somebodies point.
QED.
The internet creates adept users, and provides information. Teaching, should, teach people how to think, not how to Google. Give an 8 year old a calculator, and another a lesson is math, and which one ends up with better cognitive skills?
Reading information, from any source, and putting it to memory, has a least some value. A c/p from an online source is devoid of meaning, if no information is retained.
A generation of web searchers will not be a generation of “thinkers” because all of the thought is put into the search itself, not the actual content.
What happens when and if the “Internet” goes down? A transcontinental cable left parts of India (IIRC) without internet for days. I’ve read that if the “Internet” went down completely, that thousands of people would die, and people would die on a daily basis, due to our need for online data. A massive scale DOS attack could do more damage than a hundred well placed bombs.
I’ve learned a LOT from online sources, but I also have a collection of knowledge that I learned first hand, not though a monitor. Data is great, but without the real world knowledge of its application, can be useless.
Very true, your description is exactly what my daughter does, she writes the bare minimum to satisfy the requirements and doesn’t add any personal thoughts/opinions or knowledege to that.
Assuming that people will use spellcheck and grammarcheck? OK. Let’s!
In that case, when they present a paper which hasn’t been checked, you take points off for not checking it.
[del]Assuming that people will have computers?[/del]Making sure every student who hasn’t sold the computer he got with his first year’s tuition has a computer? OK. Let’s!
But then, when they’re told to present an essay typed, justified and double-spaced, you don’t accept them handwritten, you don’t accept them left-aligned and you don’t accept them single-spaced.
Re. personal thoughts: I’m currently in an MSc program; I’m awaiting the results on the first semester’s essays, but apparenly expressing your opinion on anything is a big no-no. You’re supposed to only report other people’s opinions. Being able to report other people’s opinions demonstrates critical thought… and having your own doesn’t? Stop the world, I’m getting off!
I agree that you don’t really learn to properly distinguish sources until you attend university and not always even then.
I think the problem occurs because of a lack of critical thinking, which I did learn at school. Because they don’t know any better they believe whatever they read on the internet, maybe because of a lack of basic science (for example) knowledge they then go on to believe in ID or cold fusion or any one of a million other false “scientific ideas”.
I had a friend who, even though he was university educated, basically believed the last thing he read to be true, so you could give him the Torah one day and Mein Kampf the next and his opinion would change accordingly (extreme example I know). I think the internet feeds into this kind of mentallity (I’m not saying he was produced by this as we worked together pre internet).
I still think the pros outweigh the cons here, as a grad student I can’t imagine going to the library to photocopy journal articles when I can just download them and sort out the good from the bad at my leisure. Plus as others have said the intenet allows us to communicate with people all over the world. I’m in the UK and by using the dope have gained new insight into other cultures and ideas than those I am familiar with.
When I was in high school I had a math teacher insist upon making us learn how to figure square roots without a calculator. He said we might not always have a calculator handy when we needed to find a square root. Thing is, I always have a calculator handy. In my office right now, I have a calculator on my computer, a 99 cent calculator sitting right next to it, and a calculator on my phone. I am literally never more than an arm’s reach from a calculator.
That’s how the internet is going to be for these kids. So, instead of forcing them to do it the old way, researching from an encyclopedia or whatever the hell Ron Jeremy thinks they should do, we should be teaching them how to use the internet properly as a research tool. Teach kids to live in the world that will exist when they are adults, not the world that existed when Ron Jeremy was a kid.
I heard Ron Jeremy claimed to have done all his own stunts, but I didn’t know he worked without a net!
You honestly believe everything that’s in print will eventually be online? 'Cause I got a TON of microfilm that calls you a liar. And four people using it right this minute.
and many of them were quite cunning, too.
Man, those were the golden years of MTV.
Are you seriously suggesting that material valuable enough to be microfilmed will never be digitized? Or are you saying that it will never be freely available to the general public?
It definitely won’t be free for the general public, of course. And I think you’re seriously underestimating how much stuff is out there - if there’s a small enough audience (smaller newspapers, etc.) then there’s no money in digitization.
How can he hate the net when he’s probably personally responsible for half the things on here?
Holy crap! I’m at work here ya know!!!
I would think Jeremy’s overall displeasure with the internet is that it provides free access to better quality performances than the public used to pay him for viewing privileges at theaters & video outlets.
Corollary : my college US Civ. professor told us that we could bring any book, text or document we wished to the exam, including notes taken in class, the material he handed us himself etc… I was stunned and figured it would be a total piece of cake.
Come the mock exam week, US Civ. was one of those courses that really took a back seat when it came to cramming - I didn’t work it at all, merely selecting a towering pile of documentation to bring. I didn’t even bother reading most of the books, I could do that during the exam, right ?
Boy did I tank that mock. Which I guess was the point.
Come the real exam, I didn’t do much more work : I simply got myself a rough picture, and more importantly learned how the information was organized in the fewer books I brought with me. I read them, but I certainly didn’t memorize them by heart.
I rocked the exam.
Similarly, while my high school physics and math teachers all insisted we beothians learn each and every formula and theorem by heart, I quickly discovered that in higher education, every exam either offered a “cheat sheet” of every formula needed for the problems, or allowed students to store them in their calculators. Because knowing the actual formulas isn’t actually important to understanding physics or solving problems, only knowing how and when you’re supposed to use them.
So, I concur with the Feynman quote upthread : what’s the worth of learning everything by heart ? You only need learn where and how to look up anything should you ever need to, and how to process that information to suit whatever your ultimate purpose is (whether it’s passing an exam, better understanding a book or a news story, doing your job or pwning someone in GD). What information you really need in your daily life or job, you’ll naturally commit to memory by simple virtue of using it anyway.
Just what I was thinking.
Yeah, and now the semen crusting the walls and floor is all my own!