Group items tagged

The internet offers so many gateways to other pages, that it has made it difficult for us to focus on one piece of information at a time. In other words: the internet is making us all a little more A.D.D. Experts describe this habit of darting from page to page as "associative" thinking. They have especially noticed this habit in younger children, whom are comparably less focused on studying, reading, and writing then the age group was when measured in the past. This is damaging to reading ability because it decreases our ability to comprehend what we read.

Another way researchers believe the internet has impacted our critical thinking abilities is that we now use less reliable sources to learn about new ideas. We often accept any article as fact. They found that students children’s reading abilities now do less research before answering a question. They also found that they trusted their friends for answers more than adults. They attributed this habit being a result of internet exposure

"What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.” -Nicolas Carr, Author of "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google"

Online Collaboration Project – Frustrations

Yet, we all know that group work often leads to one student completing the project (or making all of the decisions) and the other group members contribute only passively.

While online courses work to engage students in discussion via blogging or message boards, they cannot replace the kind of thought necessary to discuss ideas face-to-face.  When classroom (actual, not virtual) discussions get going, the back and forth between teacher and students as well as student to student leads to many insights and the playing with ideas simply cannot be accurately mimicked in an online discussion

Other negative effects of technology on learning: -Technology makes it easier to cheat and plagarize -Decrease in critical thinking -Decrease in analysis skills -Decrease in imagination -Don’t process as much during class, easily distracted

Texting/Digital Communication: One of the issues we discovered is the negative effect texting and instant-message language has on student’s writing capabilities.  Our research shows that acronyms and abbreviations are slipping into student’s writing.  Rather than using formal English when writing papers, many students use digital language, which includes things like: -lower case ‘i’ rather than uppercase ‘I’ -b/c for because -idk for i don’t know -recurrent grammar issues -Many, many more: http://www.aim.com/acronyms.adp

Negative Effects: Spell-check: Through our research we discovered that many students rely too heavily on spellcheck to correct their spelling, and as a result, have poor spelling skills.  In the following video, a high school girl describes her spelling problems from dependency on spellcheck.  It also addressed the problems that arise from text speak.

It's natural for languages to evolve. But what should really concern us is the way computers and mobile phones are changing our attitudes toward language.

Are instant messaging and text messaging killing language? To hear what the popular media say, a handful of OMGs (oh my god) and smiley faces, along with a paucity of capital letters and punctuation marks, might be bringing English to its knees.

90 percent of parents said their children under age 2 watch some form of electronic media. On average, children this age watch televised programs one to two hours per day.

Parents who believe that educational television is "very important for healthy development" are twice as likely to keep the television on all or most of the time.

Many video programs for infants and toddlers are marketed as "educational," yet evidence does not support this.

CONS Social Media can be a Distraction

These instructors maintain that tools like Facebook and Twitter divert students' attention away from what's happening in class and are ultimately disruptive to the learning process.

Cyberbullying

On the 20th anniversary of the first mobile phone text message...  How texting made history but ruined our language - and plenty of marriages!

On the 20th anniversary of the first mobile phone text message...  How texting made history but ruined our language - and plenty of marriages!

Texts have changed the way we write, obliterating conventional punctuations and replacing properly spelled words with abbreviations, initials and ‘emoticon’ smiley symbols