TOPIC: ISSUE205 - "As societies all over the world have more and more access to new information, the effects on life-long learning can only be positive."
WORDS: 584 TIME: 00:45:00 DATE: 2007-8-7 12:00:28
Television, Computers and Internet; these new access in our society has greatly shape the way we get information and add to its complexity. Then someone might think it will greatly advance our pace of learning. However, although modern society has more access to new information, it can still have negative effect on learning.
Admittedly, these new access to information obviously facilitates our learning. Televisions can provide more vivid image to demonstrate the internal structure of a compound when it comes to the learning of chemistry. Internet shares all the newly discovery all around the world, and we can more conveniently absorb wisdom of others. Computer as it is, this amazing tool can be a perfect and efficient assist to the research process. All these respects are showing a bright future of the new accesses to information.
However, are all the cases similar like this? To answer the question we should look deeper into the characters of these new accesses. One significant character of the increasingly accesses to new information is that the fast speed of the transmit of information, this is quite easy to understand, internet transmit information at the speed of light-nothing known in real life can travel faster than this. This nature undoubtedly facilitates our study to some extent, just as we've discussed above. But on the other hand it add to the complexity of the information and causes repeating and overlapped information on subjects. . These two respects can impede our study to some extent, as we discuss.
First they add to the complexity of information, which might be obstacle for learning. For supporting examples to demonstrate this inefficiency, we need look no further than our daily life. When we are searching the information of history for example, by single clicking the icons on computer, we can get pills of information-maybe thousands of websites for example. However, through these piles of information, which of them is really needed? We have to dig into the sea of these data to search useful information, otherwise we might get lost in the vast sea of all these websites.
For further analysis, owing to the characters we analyses above; a more severe weakness of these more access to the information is that people are sometimes confused about what way to learn. Nowadays, we are able to demonstrate some nature of a subject muti-dimensionally. While learning math, we can get lectures on TV, we can buy piles of text books in book shop, meanwhile, we can also surf the internet to get more description of the subject. Seemingly these ways help a lot on math, however, let us recall what is taught in math? Equations, formulas, theroems and things like that. In lectures the orator is talking about this, in text books the main topic is also about this. Meanwhile, through internet you can expect no significant distinction about the information on this particular subject. Although there are benefits, but the essence of maths are repeated in different ways in different forms again and again. If we hasty get all these access to learn math, we are most likely to waste a lot of time by repeating the same thing to get trivial new understanding about the subject.
Therefore, the increase in these accesses is beneficial in some way. But as we discussed above, it require we have the ability to learn from the complexity, to learn from the repeating description on the same subject. Only under these circumstances can we get positive and avoid the negative effect from these accesses.