With the increasing use of the internet in education, what concerns me a lot are teachers who ask students to 'research' a particular topic on the internet. Initially it sounds quite impressive. But a few moments of thought and a few days of experience reveal two fundamental problems: time & security - this post dwells on the former.
Time
I suspect, and this is a non-teacher's perspective, that many teachers set homework that is not well thought out and occupies a huge amount of time with minimal benefit for the child. A typical example is find out about 'anaemia' or xyz subject on the internet. Typically children will go to Wikipedia or Google and try and understand what is written, failing that they will just copy and paste in greater or lesser detail.
I was listening to an educator from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) talking about what makes a good curriculum and she mentioned some very interesting points: She talked about the difference between 'information versus knowledge' and 'access versus understanding'. With the internet people have had a unprecedented access to information and an even greater access to dis- and mis- information. A good curriculum selects and sorts and allows students to rank and determine sources.
Teachers need to address this ability to sort and sift the information. Asking children to go and research on the internet without any further guidance to what is understood to be a quality resource is a very good way of wasting children's time. If you have helped your children with their homework you will soon find that trying to find quality resources with correct information is actually very difficult. Soon the minutes build up into hours trying to find information which in older days would have been quickly resolved by dipping into a good sized textbook.
Students need more guidance and limited access to the internet not more. Perhaps a publicly updatable website run by teachers could be started that lists the most valuable links to various resources for children. It should be human and not computer authored, and the editing of the site should be strict and avoid unnecessary repetition and links of minimal use. In essence we need a return of the school library. Ideally an Islamic version of this world library should also be formed that is compatible with the values of Islam. I have not come across any such ideas or projects on the web and would welcome any feedback on the matter.
Hi. I wrotte this from Bogotá, Colombia. I am student of Psychology in Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and I am an youtube producer too. I have animated adanh from egypt.
ReplyDeleteWhatever, i opine that internet is usefull if one can get some contact for redirect the child´s views to origins of contents. It can be an open source of knowledege.
This is easy said then done, the important thing is you select the sources and give kids a handout for them to research from it.
ReplyDeleteThere are always workarounds. If limiting internet use is the criteria.