Take this story for example. On Yahoo!, I ran across an article arguing that the publishing company, Pearson, is saying the previous statement is true. It announced a study financed by the Department of Education in which a fallacious web site was created to save the (fictional) endangered Pacific Northeast Tree Octopus.
Students were told about this octopus and were supposed to look him up online. Kids came back with information from this site and continued to believe it even after experts were brought in to inform them that it didn't exist.
Somehow, this translates into the internet making us stupid. I disagree.
A few key details were left out of the Pearson press release. For example, the students chosen were in the 7th grade. Also, they were from "economically challenged" areas.
These students are 12 or 13. When I was their age, I was trying to do as little work as possible so I could play or hang out with my friends. If someone directed me to a website, I'd probably go just there, get my information, and quit. I wouldn't check to see if any other site validated my research and I definitely would not go to the library to check an encyclopedia. Even now in college, I'm not sure I'd check more than a couple sites.
Their generation (those roughly 14 and younger) have grown up where technology rules. I remember my family's first computer in 1998. My younger brothers have never lived without a computer. They've grown up in an age where everyone has a cell phone, games are played on a Playstation or Xbox, and computers are thought to never be wrong.
I believe this is the reason those students believed the internet over the expert. We believe people are flawed while computers aren't. People can get their facts wrong or not know something. The internet, on the other hand, is the gateway to all knowledge. If we find a fact there, it must be at least partially true.
Another important fact is that they're from "economically challenged" areas. As sad as it is, students from low income families sometimes don't know how to use all the resources available. Some aren't available to them at all. A friend of mine spent his early life in an "economically challenged" area. As a high school senior, years after moving out of this neighborhood, he had no idea how the library worked. He'd found all of his information for reports online.
This study should be repeated multiple times in different areas of the country with different age groups and different economic backgrounds. I think they'd find more students in their junior or senior year of high school would question the information more than a 7th grade student. As any good scientist knows, results that can't be reproduced aren't true results.
I agree that the internet isn't making us stupid, but I do think it is making us lazy. You said that you probably wouldn't check the validity of the website and I probably wouldn't either if a teacher told me to. I have enough things to do and I would have assumed it was a legitimate source because I tend to trust my teachers.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not the internet, but what people believe about the internet. We need to change the way we look at the internet. The articles on it are not like the articles in books. They haven’t been checked for errors. For all we know, the creator of the site could have completely made everything up just like the fictional group of turtles. Schools need to teach kids to question what they find on the internet and make sure the sources they are looking at are reliable.