In January of 1996, a genius by the name of Larry Page and his fellow Standford University classmate Sergey Brin began a project that would analyze the relationships between websites in order to determine the importance of the site as compared to any inputted search term. The project, initially named "BackRub," would, within a few years, revolutionize the way the average human went about obtaining new information. It soon shot past Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN, and many other search engines, to be the number one engine that people turn to when they wish to find something on the internet. It came to be known as Google, and its very name is now used as a verb in modern culture ("Hey, thanks, I'm goanna Google that when I get home!").
Google is now used in classrooms around the world, as students look up sources for their research papers, locate images for a slideshow, or just look up sites that can bypass the school's website-blocker so they can get their fix of AddictingGames. Google is a powerful tool that allows teachers to have students seek after knowledge for themselves, no longer needing to spend hours of their personal time compiling and printing out "cheat sheets" for each particular task. Students no longer needed to spend days combing through the school library, only to find that the information they were looking for was not available. Knowledge is now at everyone's fingertips.
The logical next step, then, is for education as we know it to cease to exist. The sole purpose of teachers and classrooms will be to guide young minds through the process of using the simple but powerful tool that is the modern search engine. No longer will children have to spend over a third of their day confined to packed school rooms, dealing with the stresses of peer pressure and tough exams. Anything and everything anyone needs to know is just a few words and clicks away.
8 Comments
I hope that’s not a serious argument.
So… uhh… what’re you arguing for? Or… against?
Are you for or against Google and the 1-click answer?
I’m not arguing for anything. I’m merely stating that as the methods of obtaining knowledge change, so will the methods of teaching it.
I like this sentence. Everything you need to know…
Well, I’d just like to pull up the topic of Wikipedia. We all know that it’s a huge Encyclopedia for anything and everything there is to know. But does it really know the right information? Anybody in the WORLD can logon to Wikipedia and type in stuff they have no idea about.
Anybody can create a website and put information on it. So, how do we know if it’s real information, or false?
We go to the books.
One thing about information on the internet:
Take everything with a grain of salt. It’s not always accurate because it doesn’t have to be. If you want the most accurate information, read a textbook. (But no one wants to do that, so we instead get a condensed version from a school teacher anyway).
Online databases are good for information, too, but most of them require a school ID, and for your school to be registered with said database.
The day they invent ctrl + F for textbooks, I’m using that.
=win.
The fact that endless real and false information are seconds away from our fingertips, scares me. We don’t try to discern the truth from the fiction.