Summary: The Influence Of The Internet On Young Learners

The word “research,” used as both a noun and a verb, is a term many students become familiar with at a very young age. In fact, this is an action that becomes vital to a student’s success. These young learners are a part of a generation raised with the internet at their disposal. The technologically advanced culture today’s young people have grown up in, has influenced their cognitive functioning in a major way. In fact, this generation’s cognitive functioning goes hand-in-hand with the internet, as referenced by Clive Thompson, there is a bold reliance on the “the machine” in itself and allowing the internet to decide what information is written by experts and what information is written by newbies. It seems as if today’s learners would …show more content…
Suzanne LaBarre from Popular Science states that when “trolls and spambots” overwhelm the comment sections below articles, a reader’s perception can be skewed. This was proven by a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that looked at the influence of uncivil comments on a fake blog post on nanotechnology. Lead researcher, Dominique Brossard, found that “uncivil comments not have only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.” This is leading to the erosion of scientific facts. These facts are becoming no more than “some guys” opinion in individuals’ minds. A prime example of this is posed by Nicholas Carr. He reports that a research program at the University College of London documented the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites suggests; the way we read and think is changing. Carr’s research found that the individuals using these two research sites showed “a form of skimming activity.” Online users would jump from one source page to another, rarely revisiting sources. This is yet another example of how our cognitive functioning is changing because of the …show more content…
In fact, Thompson mentions in his article that kids are almost never formally taught in school how to determine if information they find on the internet is written by experts or newbies. This is clearly a problem, when students need to research information for curriculum work, they do not have these 21st century skills needed to determine if what they have found is trustworthy because they were likely never taught the skills to analyze the data. Therefore, to increase the quality of curriculum work completed and create highly-educated individuals, the teaching of these 21st century skills that give students the ability to find trustworthy resources should be added to the curriculum. By adding the teaching and practicing of these skills into the curriculum, we are setting our students up to become highly-educated individuals in the ever changing world of tomorrow. Although there are many solutions to this problem of a lack of 21st century skills, this is the solution that we find most applicable to our academic