The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow
Bill Gates
Modern technology has made everyone’s life easier, more fun and functional. With the Internet today, you can communicate with loved ones at great distances, to find large amounts of information in a few seconds, to make purchases and pay bills. The Internet gives the ability to find business ideas, browse the news. But on the education such information technology has not very good effect.
The indisputable advantage of the Internet on education is that the network offers unlimited opportunities to find information – necessary books, encyclopedic information, scientific articles, a documentary video, etc. Also for students the fact that they can now share their homework, found the information by e-mail, ICQ-client, Skype is very convenient.
The negative side is that the Internet is very firmly entrenched in the lives of pupils and students and, thus, students have very little contact with teachers and university professors. Even graduate works today are not brought to a consultation with the teacher, but are sent by e-mail. A teacher after checking in the same way submits the work to a student with all edits corrections. This option allows you to save time and effort to travel to the university or college, do not require that teachers spending their free time for a meeting with the student.
But, despite these obvious advantages, information technologies have a very distinct disadvantage – teachers less communicate with students, increasing amounts of work in universities are given for independent study. No more sense to sit in class, when the book on which the teacher provides the material, you can easily find online and download. Moreover, the teacher will show himself a link to a website where you can find stuff.
This situation led to the fact that today the stationary form of education is not very different from the distant. Students almost all of the new material comprehend without the help of teachers and the difference between the stationary and distant is only in the fact that students of full time education more likely attend university, and the payment on the contract is much higher.
Also to the number of disadvantages of information technology in education such as schoolchildren and students access to information that would have been more useful to teachers than students can be attributed. Thus, pupils with access to the Internet and a sufficient amount of free time, learn technology news, literature, and modern developments, etc. first, much earlier than teachers who spend most of their time at work and not able to keep track of everything going on in the world.
This leads to the fact that students often have more new information in a given area, and the teacher can point out inaccuracies, inconsistencies of the information that he provides the latest information. This has led to a significant reduction in the authority of teachers in schools and universities, disrespect of students to teachers. Indeed, the majority of pupils and students think that once they have found a mistake in the submitted by the teacher material, they may look at him indulgently, not realizing that the value lies in the systematic knowledge and not in one fact gleaned from the Internet.
Conducted in primary schools U.S. testing showed that students who actively use a computer, were, according to teachers, “frighteningly limited” in the ability to create their own visual images or ideas. Therefore, the scientists called on the authorities to implement “a moratorium on further expansion of the use of computers in the pre-school and primary school education.” Scientists suggest preparing a medical official report assessing the threats that the use of computers in education has on the physical and emotional development of children.
Japanese and English doctors also sound the alarm. Among their patients the number of complaints of violations of the memory function has increased. Research carried out by scientists of a Japanese hospitals among patients aged 20 to 35 years, showed that the current generation, brought up on all kinds of “external memory” devices, lose the ability to learn new, remember the old, as well as allocate from an enormous amount of information the necessary one.
According to doctors, this degradation of “computer generation” is linked to the spread of various organizers and similar servers in the Internet where all possible information can be brought. Young people from wean train own memory, because the “external memory” is always at hand, because of the virtually unlimited capacity of these devices lose their ability to evaluate what information they really need and without what they can operate.
Thus, information technologies in a rapidly changing world are becoming a more important factor of the existence and development of children and adolescents, when relationships with the social environment form. Modern information technologies significantly transformed the structure of their leisure time, especially with respect to boys and girls of 12-13 years old, as it is at this age children are passionate about video games more than in older age. So on the whole information environment is rebuilt, and the characteristics of the educational process change.
