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Web-Based Learning Can Lead To Addiction… Apocalypse?

By September 19, 2007No Comments

It’s interesting being back in an educational environment because you receive an information explosion from almost everywhere you turn, along with a bit of a shock at just how technology focused, and addicted, our society is becoming.

I have a Science class which tracks earthquakes and land mass changes around the world with live net feeds to seismographs; a class on desktop publishing which is taught remotely by the professor who is in Mexico; a Journalism course which encourages me to keep a list of networked bookmarks that people from all over the world can access and a fourth professor who is available through no less than 5 separate forms of communication, not including traditional phone calls or emails.

On the first day of said Science course, the wizened Geophysicist intoned, “The Internet is down so I can’t show you any of the sites and pictures I had laid out for you, so we’ll use my old slides”.

If the Internet goes down, does it actually makes things more difficult or are we simply forced to work a little harder? According to a 2004 study, it looks as though it can in some cases be impossible.

Considering the age of that report, perhaps there might be something a bit more recent. Not only is there this addictive gem courtesy of CNN to look at , but another from the student paper at Case Western Reserve University provides a few ideas of how to deal when we are faced with a world devoid of the Web.

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