Internet as a teacher
Technology is not a surprise to us anymore: Every day we see how it’s influencing and changing our lives, being our library of knowledge.
However, this “knowledge” is not as good as it seems. Students are day after day working less because of the facilities that Internet provides and being more and more less confident about themselves: all they need is on internet, they don’t have to research anymore, to look for books, to really study about, they just have to “google it” and there is the answer for their questions. Do you think it’s really good? These facilities provided by the Internet really help us? Or is it taking out our autonomy? Internet has become necessary, but at a high cost. Our teachers, who once were the owners of the knowledge, have been substituted by this “holder of wisdom” and they are becoming secondary characters at the learning process. This happening was pointed before, as we can see in this mention: “[…] the main function of a teacher cannot be the dissemination of knowledge anymore, what now is done in a more effective way.
Their business should follow the idea of incentivize the learning and thinking. A teacher is turned into an animator of collective intelligence of the groups that are his/her charge” (Translated from: Levy, 199, p. 170). This way, they are becoming replaceable and our children are more and more dependent on the Internet, turning it into a new teacher of everything they want without thinking on how correct the given information is. The problem generated is also cited by other researches, as wee see in this one: “Given the nature of the web – the fact that anyone with access to it can put information on it – it is inevitable that there is room for incorrect information […]”It has to stop: not the use of internet, but this process of substitution that’s happening with our teachers. They were, they are and they will always be necessary in everyone’s life, it’s something that cannot be acceptable to change.
We, teachers or not, cannot agree with this. Internet came to be a helpful addition, not to take teachers place on schools.
