Technology Advances: assistance or hindrance?

So I was sat on the train the other day, and I overheard a conversation between a mother and a child about the supposed ‘excessive’ amount of time that he spent on ‘screens’ during the day. The mother’s argument was that his ‘addiction’ to these screens had a negative effect on the way he socialised in real life, and his performance at school.

Now, whilst I agree that sitting on Facebook for hours on end, absent mindedly refreshing the page for something remotely interesting to appear on your news-feed is counter productive to say the least, I strongly disagree that spending time on ‘screens’ is a bad thing; providing you go about it in the right way.

We are blessed with the gift of the internet. We have an enormous archive of valuable knowledge quite literally at our fingertips, and the younger generations have all the skills and intuition to access it. I have been struck recently at the amount of fantastic educational channels that exist on YouTube. Terrific though it is to be able to watch endless home videos of cats playing pianos and falling off window-sills on this wonderful site, it is in fact a treasure trove of learning material that is quite unlike any class you may sit at school.

‘Crash Course‘ is a channel run by brothers John and Hank Green that consists of brief and informative videos about a range of topics, from science to literature. Their modern and often comical take on world history and classic novels bring a fantastic zeal to the topic and the animations that accompany the videos make them accessible to an extremely wide audience.

Alongside this channel, are numerous other mathematical channels that give real life application to the often misunderstood school subject. ‘ViHart‘ is a channel run by a girl who finds mathematical patterns and rules in every day life and is able to present them in a visually fascinating way for the audience. Not to mention the channel ‘Numberphile’ who address strange and wonderful mathematical phenomena for the so called ‘geeks’ of the internet.

I also recently discovered an online learning organisation entitled ‘Khan Academy‘, a non-profit organisation that gives all internet users access to a library full of resource, covering a range of topics, so that they can learn what they want, when they want. It is essentially an online classroom – which raises the idea: “Will the internet eventually change education forever?”

The answer is essentially: yes. It is already beginning to. In the near future, children won’t only being using the internet to socialise with their friends and share photos and videos. They will be able to use it more efficiently to support the knowledge they are taught in school. Even teachers now use the internet as a valuable form of enriching the curriculum, whether it’s showing youtube videos of the stages of Mitosis or using it to compare classic novels with their film equivalents.

The fact is, we should not be limiting the ‘screen time’ of children, but ensuring their knowledge of the possibilities that lie within the realms of the internet. It has the ability to make learning fun and accessible. We should be harnessing this in order to progress in educating each upcoming generation.