Students trapped in the web of learning 

A few weeks ago a Canadian donor expressed interest to donate 5000 second-hand computers to schools in Tanzania that cannot afford to buy computers. Many schools in the country would be very thankful to receive the computers and in the coming decade it is likely that in Tanzania more schools than not will have computers for its students.  

There are many advantages of computers and the Internet and it will soon be almost impossible to live without these. However these have led to a striking drift in the learning process that is already being experienced today in schools or households, which already have computers. 

In the years we pursued our education, which was not very long ago, there were no computers. A school assignment was a much-revered task. It used to be a task where students had to visit libraries, read newspapers and sometimes refer to documented archives to come up with a good project. With that approach students were encouraged to learn and read more when preparing notes. 

Today in schools and households that have computers the approach to school projects and even homework has seen a radical change with many students relying more and more on the Internet for quick facts rather than taking the pain to read through various sources to obtain facts and figures. 

For those children who do not have enough time to access computers in school they come home with a sense of urgency to their parents asking to use the home computer or to visit a cyber cafe. Some may ask their parents to help who despite not knowing any details simply surf through Internet search engines to download pertinent information so that their children can submit their assignment on time. 

Whether the subject is on sports, history or animal life, this has become a common approach to homework and school projects in many households that have school going children. Teachers give projects, children pass it off to their parents or seek the Net’s refuge themselves and the completed assignment then obtains a fine grade through this cut-and-paste method. 

The Net is a useful tool but if relied upon solely for information it can impede students’ innovativeness, desire to learn and their initiative. The urge to run around and gather information will greatly reduce and this is why we today barely hear of new book libraries in our country while cyber-cafes have sprung up in abundance. 

For those parents who do their children’s homework or for those children who entirely depend on the Internet for information there is often a lack of proper understanding as to why a particular project is given by a school. The underlying essence of a school project is not only to compile accurate facts or precise statistics. Rather it is to stir a student intellectually so that he or she is able to trace the right source of information and collate the results from different sources. The typical project would encourage a child to subconsciously go through the ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘where’ of a subject with the objective of letting a child have a proper understanding of a task he or she is given. 

Sole dependence on the Internet affects the natural learning process and can even cause a child to develop anti-social behaviour. Schools and teachers in the country would do well to assess projects more on practical involvement where the quality of presentation, extent of information and the effort by a child to obtain information from different sources are all considered prior to grading a submission. 

When grading projects in this way it would not be surprising if a teacher would give higher marks to students who submit much scribbled and at times not very neat notes as compared to students who come up with spic-and-span submissions where material is simply downloaded from the computer and printed after being given a nice design face-lift with suitable clip arts. 

The logic would not be to penalise neat work but to judge on the actual effort of a child to produce the required details and to stop students from completing month long assignments in a day or two by simply cutting and pasting Internet downloads.  Written and not very neat notebooks often reflect that a child has worked through the project rather than simply copying and pasting information from the World Wide Web. 

To counter over-dependence on the Net, schools should constantly remind parents and children that projects and home-work would be graded not only on facts, figures and quality of presentations but also on the actual effort put in by a child to obtain information from different sources. Additionally teachers can ask students to outline sources of information as a footnote to their submissions.