Google has replaced rote memorization of facts. Its an amazing resource that allows students to (ideally) focus on higher order thinking skills and for teachers to concentrate on teaching inquiry rather than regurgitation of knowledge.

The obvious downside here is that avoiding and even defining plagiarism has gotten extremely difficult. Ask ten people to define plagiarism and you'll get ten different answers. There's obviously a line, but that line is very thick and very grey. I just started my new job as a school librarian and this is a major focus of my curriculum - plagiarism, citation, copyright, intellectual property rights, and so on.

As I see it, the big issue is copying versus stealing and the definition of originality. Its difficult to be original, especially in high school and college, when anything you write about has already been written and can be found in various forms online.

(Sidebar: when I worked at the public library one of my biggest pet peeves was that e-books couldn't be lent out to more than one person at a time and had an expiration after X number of loans. How the fuck is that a good way to go about lending an e-book? If I make a copy of an e-book and lend it to fifty people who would have borrowed it otherwise, how does that hurt publishers? Seriously, fuck them.)

"kid was searching up "girls with big boobs and no shirts on""

girls AND "big boobs" OR "big tits" AND NOT shirts

They'll learn, give them time.

The Internet would make education much better if education caught up to the Internet. All levels of schooling still unduly depend on rote memorization and de-emphasize higher order thinking skills even though that model is obsolete thanks to search engines.

I'm going to disagree with you there, Eden. There's still a place for rote learning. Multiplication tables come to mind. It's extremely frustrating to see my peers pull out a calculator or a smartphone to do simple arithmetic. It's also ridiculous to see people rushing to a search engine to look up basic geography (capitals of Canadian provinces, for instance).

http://online.wsj.com/articles/john-taylor-a-new-twist-in-online-learning-at-stanford-1409610594?KEYWORDS=Stanford+online

From a professor teaching online and the differences on how this works. In order to get credit the students have to do additional work and interact with the professor to make the course more like an in class experience. You can do it online or a few decades ago by remote site viewing of video, but to make sure they are learning you need more than submit papers and do exams.

Google and other search engines limit access to information since you get popular sites tailored to your past browsing history that an uninformed person has no idea of their reliability.

How many people here would trust an Aryan Nation site for WW II information?

"Google and other search engines limit access to information since you get popular sites tailored to your past browsing history that an uninformed person has no idea of their reliability."

There's always Startpage. Or deleting cookies, changing your user agent string, and going through a proxy.

It has made media literacy a vital skill for kids. I have done classes where I gave them a single factual question and told them to answer it and back it up with internet resources. They invariably can't agree on anything and there is a resource to back up every stance. Then we start talking about identifying credible sources.

Pangloss, I'm not sure there's any reason to require memorization in anything other than a foreign language or potentially in certain sciences anymore. Math doesn't require memorization - you can get all those tables anywhere you want, and you have a calculator. All those formulas? Google is your friend. Over time using these resources, you will naturally memorize the basic things that you need to memorize and it serves the same purpose as rote memorization while engaging the students that much more.

By the way, I exclude foreign languages because translators are typically inaccurate.

In general, I find that, since high school, when I first had access to a computer/smartphone whenever I found it necessary, I've learned more online than I have in classes. I find things that interest me or that have practical value in the world I live in and am going to live in for the remainder of my life as opposed to wasting my time memorizing and regurgitating. Rather than teaching students how to pass the standardized tests next week in order to get the school more funding, lower level schools (younger students) should be teaching kids from a very young age how to effectively use the internet and how to effectively learn outside the classroom.

As for credible sources, this is such an overblown issue, especially surrounding Wikipedia. If students are actually taught to use Wikipedia and similar web-based encyclopedias effectively, there is very little danger in using an uninformed site without any credibility. It's those instructors that tell students to use the internet and then don't tell them how to differentiate between the casual blog, the peer-reviewed journal, the easy-to-read and credible source page, and the "Aryan Nation site" that make source credibility a problem. It's not the internet's fault.

bo_sox, I think in much of mathematics, memorisation is key to understanding. I think this also applies to most subjects, but I'll focus on math so that we don't get bogged down in a conversation on the utility of history and philosophy. If you don't remember how to do derivatives, then you're going to have trouble reversing the operation to do integrals. If you don't remember how to do simple arithmetic, or if you need to use a tool to aid you in it, you're going to have a hard time doing any sophisticated operation.

I'm in economics, and we have problems known as Kuhn-Tucker problems, where we have to calculate up to eight different values by using the Lagrange multiplier. It takes about 20 minutes to do, and if I'm entering every line into my calculator, I'm going to have a bad time.

Caclulators and the Internet are not substitutes for knowledge. They should not be used to replace basic abilities.

I used to have to go to the library and find books for papers in middle school and even high school. My life became 1000x easier when I was allowed to use online sources.

Google isn't replacing our memory but its replacing objects and people we used to associate with our transactive memory - that is, devices we use to enhance our relatively poor ability to remember details. For example, I have no idea what my bank account number is, what my password is, or what my balance is (roughly). My wife knows all that. I compensate for that by knowing recipes by memory and being able to buy groceries without a list. If my wife goes grocery shopping, we end up with Oreos, chocolate chips, and toothpaste but nothing for dinner. Google and other Internet applications now do this job for us - my grocery list is on Evernote, my bank account password is saved in my browser, and I bookmarked my wife's favorite recipes. Both of us now have an enhanced ability to retrieve this information without having to commit all those tasks and information to memory.

Since I can let the computer remember useless things like math and science, I can focus my memory on Diplomacy strategy.

"Caclulators and the Internet are not substitutes for knowledge. They should not be used to replace basic abilities."

Of course not, but why not as supplements? There's no need to tell a student that they can't use a calculator and force them to write something out by hand when they have access to a calculator. Sorry, but old ways aren't going to stick. Why hesitate? Use calculators, use the internet, incorporate them into your curriculum and use them as a major supplement since technology is a major part of students' lives.

I don't take any math classes, nor will I ever again if things stay as they are, so I don't know much about it. As for something like history or philosophy or whatever, though, the internet is an incredibly useful source. I can find a peer reviewed journal in ten seconds, and it's not like it's hard to tell if it's credible. I can look up the history of X culture or whatever with the click of a button as opposed to shlepping over to a library and looking things up. You should still know how to go to a library and look things up because libraries are still there and they are incredibly useful, but online encyclopedias like Wikipedia are incredibly useful if you know what you're looking for and how to differentiate the credible from the crap.

Pangloss I'm not saying that we should do away with all rote memorization, lol. There's a big difference between "No more rote memorization" and "We focus too much time on rote memorization given our current level of technology."

"Of course not, but why not as supplements? "

I'm not arguing against supplementing knowledge. For sure, I don't remember exactly everything that has to do with history, say. But because it's there and because it's so useful, people are increasingly using it as a replacement. Maybe it's my peer group, but I know so many people who wish to forgo studying or learning because Wikipedia and Google are so easily accessible. What's the point, they ask, if we can just look it up?

I think this is a necessary outcome of Google and the Internet. It's the path of least resistance.

"There's no need to tell a student that they can't use a calculator and force them to write something out by hand when they have access to a calculator."

There was also no need for my stats prof to make me calculate covariance by hand. But he made me do it anyway. I understand it better now than if I had just had Excel or any other tool tell me what it was. The same applies to calculators in general. I only use mine for sin/cos/tan tables and decimal division/multiplication at more than three decimal places. The rest I can do in my head or quickly on a sheet of paper. It's actually faster, and it helps me understand proofs/derivations of equations more quickly because I have access to a wider variety of mathematical tools at greater speed.

Outside of math, memory is still useful. If you're studying, say, pax Britannica (1815-1914), it's important to know what happened in 1815 to bring about its start (fall of Napoleon, among other things) and what happened in 1914 to end it. I can keep coming up with examples, but the point is that having something in your memory helps you because you can summon the knowledge more quickly, which will allow you to draw links between prior knowledge and new.

PE, I didn't refresh before posting my reply. I think I also respond to what you've just said, though. When we begin to rely on the Internet and other educational crutches, we slowly progress to being solely dependent on them. The Internet is great as a resource gathering tool, but it should never replace studying and memorisation for actual learning.

The internet has not "done" anything to education. LOUSY educators have done various (bad) things to education. Just because the internet exists doesn't mean that (lousy) educators need to turn over their responsibility to teach to a tool and pretend like they have done their job.

@krellin

Clearly the internet has done a lot to all kinds of information propagation, including education. Take this irrefutable statement from pangloss:

"rather than spending hours in the library hunting through journals and books"

During the hours when I had to research stuff during the early 90s, in actual libraries, those hours were spent mulling over what I was going to write, in the back of my mind. Now, that mulling has to be done at some other time. That's a big difference.

You don't have to delegate education to the internet, for the internet to have an effect. The speed (faster) and quality (lower?) of the information might be having a qualitative effect, and it's worth thinking about.

https://31.media.tumblr.com/fa2ff51fa6370bc3693706145a2fed16/tumblr_myxawc5Zhz1r8juclo1_500.png

On the upper levels, I think the Internet has been done wonderful and amazing things for education. I'm a chemistry grad student. Internet databases have helped my research immensely, especially with papers I wouldn't have been able to find in a university library. My favorite example is when my colleague found an obscure paper from Bangladesh that pushed our project forward three months. We wouldn't have been able to do that without the internet.

On a more education-of-studentsy level, I still think it's got plenty of good qualities. Knowing that my students can competently use google lets me assign more interesting problems that aren't in their books, while teaching them how to do real research.

Also, while it has made plagiarism easier, it has also made the most egregious forms of plagiarism that much easier to detect. School services are 100% accurate at detecting word-for-word plagiarism, and I've found one case where a student copied data sets from a national database. (The student failed.)

tendmote - I see how the internet is ***ABUSED*** in the education of my children, where LAZY teachers shuffle off the direct education of my children to the internet as (passive) tool.

You - apparently a product of an internet-based education - failed to read what i actually wrote.

I did not criticize the internet directly. It is an information tool. Yippeeeeee.....So is the fucking LIBRARY. This insistence that the internet is some wonderous tool of information dissemination is utter nonsense. It is marginally better than a well-equipped library, and is often times FAR WORSE than a well-equipped library, because under-educated children all not able to properly discern what IS and what is NOT valid information on the internet.

I can find you *very* legitimate "information" on the internet, complete with picture, on Alien Autopsies...

Yeah...the internet is just great....

Like everything, there are good and bad things. It's certainly made research faster. I don't know how I could go through life without searchable PDFs. On the other hand, a younger sibling of mine just cannot seem to grasp how to use a paper dictionary.

Very legitimate *looking* information about alien autopsies, that should have read.

" This insistence that the internet is some wonderous tool of information dissemination is utter nonsense. It is marginally better than a well-equipped library, and is often times FAR WORSE than a well-equipped library, because under-educated children all not able to properly discern what IS and what is NOT valid information on the internet."

You can't really believe that. Here's Magna Carta online in the original Latin with links to an English translation and videos explaining the document's significance. All available for free, instantly, in the comfort of your own home.That's only marginally better than your local library?

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/index.html

@krellin If you're saying lousy teachers will provide a lousy education, then that's always true, and you're correct in saying that the internet will not magically make that better. But I'm more interested in the effects that the internet is having on quality education, rather than what's happening in some culturally deprived backwater.

the internet has made the access to information tremendously easier, but has created a lazier scholastic society.

I think that this question varies by school system, some school systems teach kids how to use technology to find accurate and interesting information. The internet is probably the most dynamic source of information ever created. You can find anything online, it is exceedingly more powerful then a library, but only if you know how to use it. Same as a library, if you don't understand how it's organized you can look forever for something and never find it. That is what some educators have been able to help students with and some haven't.

When you get into college it varies completely by major. For example Computer Science degrees have come so far because of the internet. There are resources available that allow an entire class full of students to create their own websites, attach them to databases on their local machines to test out php written code. That type software is available only because of the internet. Doing something like that before the internet was used in education would have been exceedingly more complicated.

As for other majors, I don't see the use being as high, and I can see where in majors like English and math how it can be widely abused or used as a crutch.

But overall, the internet can be very helpful or very destructive based on the subject, parents, students, and educators involved.

I teach my students to use the CRAP test (my younger students anyway) to evaluate online sources based on four criteria: currency, reliability, authority, and purpose. Is it current enough for your purpose? Is it from a reliable source? (scholarly and reputable sources obviously better than blogs/crowdsourced answer sites/etc.). Who authored the source? What is the purpose of the piece? (point of view, persuasive or not, neutrality).

In my experience, students can evaluate sources well and its not difficult to teach this skill. The big issue with students, high schoolers especially, is the writing part of research. High schoolers are digital natives who are able to, for the most part, find relevant and quality sources, but being able to pull relevant facts, write a thesis statement, and make an inquiry based research plan are where most students fall short.