Internet as an Educational Tool

You must all be wondering: what happens if teachers and professors were all supplanted by machines and robots? What would happen if all knowledge and information were transferred automatically from machines to all people? Isn’t that a more faster way to learn? Isn’t that a more cost-efficient (to college students) and time-consuming way of taking in knowledge?

Right and wrong.

Saying that actual professors and teachers could be substituted for a piece of machinery is a total exaggeration. But it should be taken into consideration that learning with the aid of technology is indeed helping to develop a better education environment for students.

Paulo Freire states that our traditional way of learning, ‘banking education’, needs to change, because it is “dehumanizing” for the students in that the teachers basically feed them whatever they want to feed them and whenever they want to (Freie and Behuniak 340). He wants an education system where students learn to reflect, act, and think unceasingly in conjunction with the teacher. According to “Paulo Freire and ICTs: Liberatory Education Theory in a Digital Age” though, advocates of Freire actually deny the fact that technology could help alter this banking education, because the machineries that we use today in classes are actually helping students to fake their participation and connections with other students. But isn’t this the same thing as saying that having paper and pen in class is distracting since students are liable to doodling instead of taking notes? Distractions and “faux-participation” are caused by the amount of will to listen and learn, not the technology itself. Technology doesn’t force students to get sidetracked.

According to some professors using Twitter as a learning tool, Twitter, or other communicating systems through the internet, actually helps students to have “peer to peer communication” and share ideas “beyond the classrooms” (Kassens-Noor 304). This shows that communication via the internet pertains to learning via the internet. Freire states that education should involve “the interaction of reflection” and “acts of cognition” instead of just a transfer of information. Well, in fact, as peers communicate together about a topic and idea through online communication, they are not just stating some facts from a textbook, but actually reflecting upon what is written in it together as a group. They may be separated physically from each other, but their brain and minds are virtually together as one through the internet.

Internet is indeed an educational tool as is a piece of paper, which could be just viewed as a form distraction depending on who is utilizing it.