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Internet is fostering a 'want it now' culture among students
7 May 2009
Report issues warning over impact of Web 2.0 on teaching and learning, writes Rebecca Attwood
The evolution of the internet has produced a generation of students with "a preference for quick answers" and a "casual" approach to the evaluation and attribution of information, an inquiry has found.
The Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience was set up to examine the impact on higher education of Web 2.0, the second generation of web design typified by social networking and collaboratively produced wikis.
Its final report, to be published on 12 May, will say that these developments are having profound impacts on students' attitudes and behaviour - both positive and negative.
Academics who spoke to the committee, which was led by Sir David Melville, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Kent, expressed "strong reservations" about students' ability to critically evaluate information from the web.
The committee says that information literacy is a "significant and growing deficit area", although it adds that Web 2.0 has also encouraged experimentation, collaboration and teamwork by students.
Sir David said: "The use of these technologies does seem to lead to a tendency for very shallow searching for information and increases the desire for instant information.
"Even more seriously, it seems that critical skills are becoming much more of a deficit area. We heard of examples where students would take stuff off the internet - in one case, material from the BNP - and put it into essays in a totally non-critical way.
"Universities are not controlling information any more. What they should be doing is supporting students in becoming much more critical thinkers."
The committee's report, Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World, will also say that universities face a "digital divide" when it comes to the ability of tutors to use social networking in their teaching.
While some academics have embraced the use of websites such as Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, others lack the technological knowhow or are "hostile to all but the most cursory engagement with ICT".
Use of Web 2.0 technologies in learning and teaching was "considerable but patchy", and driven by the enthusiasm of individuals or small groups.
The inquiry found that students as yet only "dimly perceived" the potential of Web 2.0 as a learning tool, and could be uncomfortable with staff-initiated online discussion.
Primarily, students still valued face-to-face contact, influenced by their school experience, and believed this is what they were paying fees to receive.
The committee speculates that, in an age where information is so readily available, "the personal - interacting face to face - acquires added importance and significance".
It argues that students want traditional approaches in a modern, web-supported setting.
The committee suggests a "re-negotiation" of the role of student and tutor, under which students would help teach their tutors how to use Web 2.0 technology.
Chris Brauer, lecturer in online journalism at City University London, said he planned to respond to Twitter messages in lectures: "There are lots of academics who won't engage with social media in any form, let alone use it in their teaching - but those who have are finding all kinds of new ways to engage their students.
"A lot of the discussion that previously you could manage within your classroom environment is now happening outside," said Dr Brauer.
"You can look quite foolish in the classroom talking about something that has already been addressed thoroughly by the students in a virtual environment. If you say to them 'Now let's talk about this', they may well say 'We already did - where were you?'"
rebecca.attwood@tsleducation.com
See www.clex.org.uk for more information on the report Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.
E-JOURNALS LEAD THE WAY
Academics who use electronic journals produce more research papers and win more research grants, a new study has found.
The study - by the Research Information Network - looks at the use, value and impact of e-journals, concluding that the £80 million spent by UK universities each year on these represented "good value for money", with downloads of 102 million last year bringing costs to 80p per paper on average.
The study also found that academics who consumed e-journals were more successful in research.
Looking at moderate, high and "super-users", the study found that super-users produced more than twice as many research papers as moderate users, received over three times as much grant income, and had nearly double the number of PhD students.
It also found that about a third of traffic to e-journals came through Google or Google Scholar and readers used e-journals "well into the night and over the weekend".
zoe.corbyn@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
Yes, too true I'm afraid.
We are confronted by a 'me, me me, now, now now' culture among students (and youngsters generally) - too many of them are intellectually weak, emotionally immature and totally narcisstic.
The internet is producing a generation which does not read books of any kind.
Their leisure time consists of mobile phone conversations and 'texting', and endlessly updating their Facebook pages, and they believe that any knowledge can be gleaned from Wikipedia.
Oh, and our moronic celebrity culture also indirectly fosters the mindset that one can attain fame and fortune without having to work hard or wait for success.
I know that every generation complains about 'today's youth' (Aristotle did 2,000 years ago!) when it hits middle age, but I genuinely do believe that many of todays students are beyond educating. It is not only that they cannot think for themselves and don't read books (appalling and demoralising though these are), it is also that they simply don't seem to be interested in learning or acquiring knowledge.
Whilst it may be true to say that many of today's students are narcissists and unaware of it, I'm not sure if this is caused by web 2.0, rather I think its the result of the transformation of the media in general. Young people today are taught that unless you have conspicuous, instant talent, you are worthless i.e. you either have it or you don't. Books, then, are simply a pointless distraction on the way to being 'recognised' by the right people as having talent. What today's media does is deny that anything can be attained through perseverance and learning, when in reality this is how 99% of people achieve. I think its time for universities and academics to fight back and make the case for learning far more explicit.
(Largely @ Old-fashioned scholar)
I do wonder how much the Internet creates these problems and how much it serves merely to expose natural tendencies within academia toward the 'intellectually weak, emotionally immature and [the] totally narcisstic'. Comparing yourself to Aristotle, much? Wooly, facile use of the term "Web 2.0" does little to encourage matters either. Chris Brauer's approach seems fine to me. If you're interested in the conversation around the subject than you should be comfortable with ideas of Web 2.0. If you're not a very good, compelling or inspiring teacher you'll probably be scared by it.
Oh, and by the way, "Universities are not controlling information any more". Jesus wept!
To those who seem to favour web 2.0 sites, have you actually signed on and read the inane drivel which seems to dominate? I can't believe that in even the most Young Onesesq type student household anyone would have bothered to knock on a friend's door to say something like 'I'm going to pick my nose in a minute' and then knock again a few minutes later 'I've just picked my nose' etc. The worse thing that universities can do is engage with these technologies - they are a harmful distraction from thoughtful discussion and reflective thinking. Sadly, some senior university managers desperate to be seen to embrace ‘progress’ think that they are the way forwards. They are WRONG! Universities should have the courage to say that just because a twenty something IT whiz made squillions from their online invention doesn't make that invention useful for HE. As for 'books' I'm relaxed about how the text is accessed - whether Aristotle is read and pondered online or on paper is fine with me, just get them to read Aristotle rather than the semi-literate ramblings of a vitamin D deficient teenager.
Forsooth - this generation of students are so much worse than every generation than before them.
Those greedy get rich quick kids, educated under Thatcher from the the 1990's.
Those greedy get rich quick kids, educated under Thatcher from the 1980's
Those lazy good for nothing kids on full grants, housing benefit and general social security benefits - who wanted nothing more than not to work throughout the 1970's
And then those lazy, off their head on drugs kids who throughout the 1960's who wanted nothing more than to get laid quick
Don't start me on the wat mongerers from the 1920's, 30's and 40's who spent most of their time killing the Germans.
...and no doubt all those lazy, poorly educated students who never learned how to use an apostrophe? Seriously though, there are huge benefits to educating students in responsible and critical use of Internet resources, not least bringing them to online academic journals and designing assessments that give credit for critical analysis of the value of different kinds of evidence. Would I be alone in suggesting that my students are producing more scholarly and more thoroughly researched assignments since encouraging their use of online resources?
Universities cause some of the "hands-off" approach among academics, because they insist that we have to use ugly inflexible crudware like Moodle and its ilk, and wrestle the IT staff to the ground on a regular basis just to keep access to that - instead of simply spending ten minutes setting up a WordPress weblog and Facebook group for each module. The academic "I hate IT except for email" attitude is further encouraged via a dependency culture that has been created and sustained by paranoid jobsworth IT staff and (in my case) a lack of strong campus-wide wi-fi. At the level of scholarship, simple awareness of the wealth of free scholarly resources available on the web is also discouraged via a librarian-based dependency culture - judging from recent conversation, my heads of department seem to have no idea that things like Google Book Search exist. We trap ourselves in stale systems, but we're supposed to be teaching students for an ever-changing future career? Durh. Personally, in the company of a pert laptop, I've cut loose from the IT dept, the Moodle system, the patchy and ever-changing ejournal access, etc, and the web has constantly enabled me to do that and to do it fairly well. And the students love it.
If you're lucky enough to have a well stocked university library why do you need the help of Google Book Search in order to get through an undergraduate degree? If lecturers have taken the trouble to provide exhaustive reading lists of texts provided specifically for the courses they are teaching, and those texts are available on campus, I don't see why students have any cause to complain about their lecturers' presumption that students will use the resources that have been provided for their benefit. I simply do not understand the modern student's abhorrence of print.
@ David Knight:
"If you're lucky enough to have a well stocked university library why do you need the help of Google Book Search in order to get through an undergraduate degree?"
Because the books in my school library are not content-searchable! For example, I recently needed to find a proof that every closed interval of real numbers is a set of the first category. Using Google, it took me only a few minutes to find one, in the book Counterexamples in Analysis. It turns out that there's a copy of Counterexamples in Analysis in my school library... but without Google, I never would have known that it was the book I needed!
(And before you ask: no, I could not have found the proof in my assigned textbook, because sets of the first category were not covered in the course! The problem I was working on had been posed by another student during class, and there was no reason to believe that it could be solved using only the stuff in our textbook.)
Okay, Aaron F. - you've got me there! I have no idea what you're talking about because not being a mathematician myself I have no understanding of the role of textbooks in the teaching and learning of degree level mathematics. I defer to your relevant experience in this area. However, for most knowledge-based rather than problem solving undergraduate courses (e.g. sociology, history, English, biology), there should be no need to look beyond the university library to find everything you need. For those subjects, if the library doesn't meet your needs either it is under-stocked or you're working at a postgraduate level of sophistication.
Today I was lucky to be part of a group who participated in a lecture about the history of OER's (Open Educational Resources) and I found out that they really only got on the UK radar in 2008 - the year I moved from Canada to the UK last year. The Internet provides a huge wealth of reusable resources for both students and lecturers, and there is no need to reinvent the wheel, in math, for Aaron F. for example, physics, or in other disciplines. Also, in response to Clive's concern about the 'inane drivel' on Web 2.0 sites, do note that this rich discussion, in which Clive and I are participanting, is Web 2.0.
All very interesting. Not sure about the "librarian-based dependency culture" - wish it was - being a humble librarian in an FE college. We are almost a computer centre surrounded by books. Students do rely too heavily on Wikipedia and anything they find on Googe, despite our efforts to educate them to use some really excellent online resources. And most of them have no idea about referencing and plagiarism. It is a something for nothing culture. Why bother spending the time researching using quality resources both online and in books (large papery things wrapped up with string) when you can just cut and paste it from Google. But having said that there are some exeedingly bright students out there. We shouldn't tar them all with the same brush. A lot of work to do in Information Literacy and libraries and librarians can play their part in improving the education of our yuf.
I work in eLearning and instructional design, and I've read the report.
There is no way to make an informed comment based on this article or indeed based on the report itself. The issue is bigger and more complex than that and sadly, in my experience, HE (with a few glowing exceptions) is behind all other teaching sectors in terms of it's understanding of the role of technology in teaching and learning
People react like people. They use the technology according to their pre-existing nature. This applies to the innovators and the ludites, the honours student and the slackers.
I work in eLearning and instructional design, and I've read the report.
There is no way to make an informed comment based on this article or indeed based on the report itself. The issue is bigger and more complex than that and sadly, in my experience, HE (with a few glowing exceptions) is behind all other teaching sectors in terms of it's understanding of the role of technology in teaching and learning
People react like people. They use the technology according to their pre-existing nature. This applies to the innovators and the ludites, the honours student and the slackers.
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