Monday, January 14, 2013

We Are Not Becoming Internet Addicts

Mal Fletcher asks "Are we becoming Internet addicts?" (Online Opinion, 11 January 2013). I have been using the Internet almost every day since 1994, so I guess that makes me an addict.  ;-)

The suggestion that university students studies are suffering because they are less able to follow lectures seems to miss the point. Universities now use more interactive and on-line teaching methods, not because the students ability to concentrate has declined, but because conventional lectures were never a good teaching method. Conventional wisdom was that a student took in about 15 minutes of an hour long lecture. The lectures were an hour long simply for logistical reasons. So now live lectures are made more interactive, with discussion and exercises, or replaced with shorted recorded material on-line and with interactive exercises. An example is my ICT Sustainability course.

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