New Media and Education 3/30

New media and technology is changing almost everything about the way we learn, not only in everyday life but in a more structured environments like high schools and colleges. My generation of college students should consider ourselves so lucky to have the opportunities that we do due to the advances in technology. In my opinion, some of these advances are good but at the same time could be making us lazier. An example of this is a college student missing one class is not as much of a big deal as it used to be if the teacher is technologically in tune. Personally, I know almost all my teachers post the day’s work and upcoming assignments on the schools website. This is great for the average student who may have had something important to do, or fell ill. However this is a GREAT advantage for the kind of students who just don’t feel like showing up to class and can just think “whatever it will be up on Angel later”. There are also other factors to be considered for those kinds of students when it comes to their final grade, so maybe that is not the best example but I think it gets my point across.
Regardless of the little cheats the internet and other forms of technology that students are presented with today, if you used in the correct way we are more fortunate than ever. We can be plugged in 24/7, and when it comes to learning you can never learn too much. We have the ability to find out just about anything we want to know, and see just about anything we want to see. Professor Greenberg showed us photos from other parts of the world that he admitted he had only ever heard of until he was able to visit these places, as oppose to us where we can virtually visit them. The question with that is… will students become less motivated to travel and learn firsthand now that they can easily do it via Google images? My answer to that is no. If a person is motivated to travel the world and experience it, they will. The ones who sit back and just pull up pictures on the net obviously are not that ambitious. On the other hand, sometimes it is not within someone’s means to travel the world and in that sense it is a great thing that they can see and learn places they may never get to afford to go to.
The way in which we are learning is changing, but I do not think it is necessarily a bad thing. I personally like that instead of scribbling chicken scratch all over my notebook paper trying to get every word a professor is trying to say in, I can simply go to Angel after class and print out a neat and clean copy of that day’s lesson. With technology there will always be pro’s and con’s, but with education I think even if there’s different ways of learning being created, it can never be bad because never is gaining knowledge a bad thing.