Is the internet causing students to become complacent thinkers?

I, for one, don’t see the logic in that reasoning. How does the availability of information discourage thinking? That’s an argument against libraries and encyclopedias as well, isn’t it?

To add to the topic in general, I believe that all small children have a great amount of free spirit, and they are all extremely good at thinking for themselves. I believe that most schools, though, actively discourage the ideas children come up with for themselves. Children have to study what they are told to study, and their own interests only factor in very rarely. This is what breeds complacent thinkers, in my opinion.

I have to agree with @longgone – the logic isn’t there.

I believe that the internet is just a tool – a means to an end. A person is either going to think or not think, regardless of the tools at his disposal. A motivated person used to go to the library and check out books—now that person is more likely to use the internet to get his information.

So, for the purposes of your term paper – I would argue that the answer is ‘no.

There’s a case to be made either way. At first blush, one might think that there is a certain irony in posting this question to the internet in hopes of receiving answers rather than just answering it yourself. Indeed, someone might say that you’ve answered your own question just by doing so. You are now at leisure to let us discuss the issue amongst ourselves, picking out the parts of the conversation you like and relying on the people you trust to come up with good points. You’ll even get to see objections and replies without having to come up with either on your own.

I agree with @longgone, however, that access to information does not discourage thinking or encourage complacency. Of course, the original question was about instant access to information.—the idea presumably being that asking on the internet is a lot easier than figuring out which books to look at—but I do not think this has to make much of a difference. We must therefore figure out what is wrong with the original assessment.

For one, it is entirely possible to be complacent about the information one gets from books. I’ve had students who clearly went to the library, pulled down the first book on the topic they could find, and just copied the ideas found therein. There’s no analysis of the ideas, just heavy reliance on the assumed authority of a single source. Students who do this seem to be under the impression that if someone smart said it in a book, it’s probably true (ignoring the fact that intellectual discourse involves a bunch of smart people who can’t all be right disagreeing with one another).

For another, just as going to the library does not prevent one from substituting someone else’s opinion for one’s own, going to the internet does not require one to do so. In part, it depends on how you use the tools you are given. Going to the first site suggested by Google and just parroting what is said there is one strategy, and it is more or less the same as pulling down the first book you find and copying it. But it’s not the only strategy.

In a library, one can pull down multiple books and get a sense of a field’s diversity. Using the internet, one can load multiple sources and again receive access to a diversity of opinions. Alternatively, one could do what you did and bring the query to a discussion site. Discussion is a longstanding way of generating ideas to pick through. And there’s the rub: to do this well, one must actively pick between competing options and opinions. That’s what’s wrong with the original assessment. Even if you don’t participate in this conversation, you face a choice between just copying what we say and thinking about which parts are worthwhile.

In short, every source of information provides an opportunity for complacency. But by the same token, every source of information provides an opportunity for active thinking. It is a matter of the student, not the student’s resources.

I don’t know about thinking ,I see a problem with instant information is that people won’t bother to retain the information in their heads,because with the click of the mouse its right there again.

^^ yep, why bother to learn the times tables when one has a calculator on their phone or watch.

Yes. As a college librarian, i see much more cutting and pasting than actual researching, thinking and writing these days.

@SQUEEKY2 @bossob But keep in mind that’s the same objection some people had to the invention of writing. Why bother memorizing anything if it’s written down somewhere?

@SavoirFaire what was that like 700years ago?
And there are a lot more people around today, with your example then you agree with my example?
Plus not everyone carried everything written down so they could look at it in a second if the need arose.
Not like today with smart phones and tablets that people carry with them absolutely everywhere, don’t get me wrong I like the internet and what it is.
But I still stand by my example .

@SQUEEKY2 Compared to the times before there was written language, the change must have been much bigger than this recent one. We already have the opportunity to keep information close by, through books or by taking notes.

As an aside: Is being able to memorize facts a measure of intelligence or education? I happen to be good at memorizing, and I always felt like exactly that is an obstacle. When I need to pass an exam, I can cram all the information needed into my brain. That’s not understanding a topic, and it is not thinking. I felt much more challenged by the subjects I was interested in, because those, I didn’t want to just memorize.

@SavoirFaire Convenience and efficiency for starters. I was appalled the other day when I saw a young adult pick up a calculator to figure out 2×7. I’m seeing more and more adults who lack elementary school arithmetic knowledge, and I can imagine what a handicap it must be. But, I suppose that if one never had the knowledge, one wouldn’t recognize their limitations.

So @longgone I don’t have to learn anything I don’t want to because technology is there and just a mouse click away?

^ You are an adult. Why should you be forced to learn something you are not interested in?

@SQUEEKY2 – You seem to take increased access to information as a threat, while romanticizing at time when we were forced to memorize information – information that was often quite wrong, and was significantly more narrow in scope than anything we have today.

I’m 43 years old. For much of my life, if I didn’t know something, I could wait until I had a chance to get to the library if I remembered or had the time. Most of the time, if it wasn’t critical, I just chose to not know. Now, I have the option to know – instantly. You seem to take this option as an imposition. It’s not. The incurious can continue to just not know.

Yes and no. I think having instant access to information means overall we get more information in our lives. People who might otherwise be lazy, for lack of a better word, now look up information up. The problem is, a lot of the information on the internet is junk, and the junk seems to pop up on the first page. Back in the old days when we looked up information in reference materials in the library there was, and still is, a standard for those materials that important. We could trust what we read more.

Just a few months ago my niece was telling me that in college they can’t use contractions on reports and that she had never written a research paper in high school, and it took her a bit to get up to speed with what was required in college. What? She had nevered referenced materials on a paper she had written before college? I would cite that as a bigger problem than the internet. High school should have at least some practice with doing actual research and writing on a topic.

I think the challenge is even greater now to create students who can think for themselves. There is an overload of information and misinformation easily accessible. Our learning models need to change from one that values the memorisation and regurgitation of that information to one that can rationally and articulatly reason through the data.

Give a kid a calculator and he’ll quickly lose his math skills.

No. Math skill isn’t knowing your times table by heart it is knowing When to multiply and when to divide.

@cazzie They don’t just lose their times tables… they lose basic, fundamental, math skills. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an employee forget how to do some basic math (and requesting a calculator) whereas some of my older guys rattle off the answers sans electronics.

It’s not a flaw in the brain or anything – it just is. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

I think the same applies to research techniques. The availability of information has damaged the processes of actual research for a lot of younger folks. Reports and essays are being written based on sketchy internet articles instead of solid investigative research. Ideas and opinions are being formed based on a wiki article instead of actually reading a book that someone took the time to write.

If you don’t think the internet has made a great number of people complacent on their research.. I’d suggest more research. Wiki is a great resource.. the internet in general is a great resource.. but if it replaces all other things.. it’s a problem in my eyes.

I’m not saying you are wrong. I’m saying there is more to it than not memorising facts. They still need to learn to think.

@cazzie I apologize if I sounded defensive. Fluther has had that affect on me. You are, of course, right. There is definitely more to it than memorizing things. Although, just memorizing things is pretty damn good for your brain.

@SQUEEKY2 Writing has been around for a bit more than 700 years. In any case, there are written complaints from 2500 years ago that writing was making people stupider. The worry appears in the works of Plato, for example. Obviously, having things written down or having them on your smart phone means you don’t have to memorize them. However, that doesn’t entail becoming a more complacent thinker. I’ve never memorized the periodic table, but that in turn freed up time and mental energy for other things. And even if I had chosen to use that time and energy watching reruns of The Simpsons instead of reading, it wasn’t my phone that led me to make that choice. After all, plenty of people refrained from memorizing the periodic table before the advent of smart phones.

Therefore, I don’t see the logic in saying that the internet has caused students to become complacent thinkers—especially given the fact that plenty of students were complacent book copiers before they became complacent internet copiers. The internet has perhaps made that complacency easier, but there’s no evidence that it has become more widespread. And in the meantime, the internet has made it easier for those who are not complacent to get more work done in less time. Indeed, the internet has been a great boon for academics. Online access to journal articles means I don’t have to waste time traveling back and forth to different libraries. Online access to books means I don’t have to wait for an interlibrary loan nearly as often. It also means I can discover the existence of resources that I might not have known about—let alone had access to—as recently as 20 years ago.

So yeah, the lazy will still be lazy. But the key word there is “still.” Their laziness is—and always has been—on them. It was never the fault of the books they were copying, and it’s not the fault of the internet now. And for the productive, the internet has been an amazingly useful tool. It means I can use my mental energy for thinking instead of memorizing. So with all due respect to Plato, I’d have to say that a short pencil is usually better than a long memory.